Three 'known' Kepler exoplanets are more likely to be stars

The hunt for exoplanets has apparently led to a few near misses. MIT researchers have discovered that three "planets" observed using the Kepler Space Telescope (Kepler-699b, Kepler-840b and Kepler-854b) are more likely to be small stars. They're simply too big, the scientists found -- at two to four times Jupiter's size, they're larger than the largest confirmed planets. A fourth, Kepler-747b, might also be ruled out. It's small enough ('just' 1.8 times Jupiter's size) to be a planet, but it's d...