Since I was a little boy my mind has been occupied with the question of "Is there a life outside the Earth?". I think many of you might share these thoughts too.
We can answer this question by either getting lucky and recovering microbial samples from Mars or Europa (which I honestly think will happen in my lifetime), or detecting biosygnatures with our telescopes.
I believe the individual, with a small home lab, can now contribute their meaningful part to the second option.
That is why in September 2026 I have started designing, building and then calibrating an experimental detectors and vetting software to look through the old Kepler Bonus light curves. All 406k of them.
To find biosygnatures you first need to know where to look at. Cosmos is quite large after all.
My early experiments lead me to believe that between 500 and 4000 previously unknown exoplanets are hidden in the archival Kepler Bonus light curves.
Stars of Kepler Bonus are faint. Previously these pixels have been on purpose left behind the main Kepler exoplanets pipeline. A lot of them are in G16-18 band. It makes it really hard to extract transit signals from them. Calibrating the detector properly seems to be a Herculean endeavour.
Below I am publishing the first part of the study. It's a PDF with 125 BOIs, Bonus objects of interest, following nomenclature proposed by NASA Goddard Space Center team working on Kepler Bonus.
This yield is from the first run of the pipeline which I will be publishing shortly on GitHub. I think at least 30-40 of these might be real planets, with the rest being false positives, ecliptic binaries or grazing binaries, or simply a contamination / independent retrieval of already known Kepler planets.
I believe better calibration is needed to find more exoplanets in Kepler Bonus. My current target is a subset of m-dwarfs and k-dwarfs stars. Which might hold a lot of Earth like planets in their habitable zone.
Link to the first results: