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The last decade of space exploration has exceeded even our wildest expectations. And this is only the beginning.
The number of planets in the universe is extremely mind-boggling.
It will have time to find just a couple more candidate exoplanets.
Space exploration made easy.
This could be a game changer.
Some stars go out with a bang -- a supernova explosion! Using optical images recorded by the now defunct Kepler telescope, astronomers witnessed for the very time the shockwave that follows a star's implosion once it runs out of fuel.
While the windy and overcast weather of a stormy day isn't surprising on telluric planets, it's not something most of us readily associate with stars. But it does happen -- the best evidence for this is W1906+40, a distant dwarf star recently described in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The ever resourceful Kepler missions just reported its most interesting find to date: not one, but five planets smaller than Earth orbiting a star 117 light-years away that’s estimated to be 11 billion years old. This makes it far older than our own sun, meaning its planets could be 2.5 times as old as Earth. […]
Since it was first launched in 2009, the $600 Kepler mission has discovered more than 1,000 alien worlds. Arguably it's one of the most successful space mission in history so far, further cementing its status as a legend. The milestone was breached after eight newly confirmed exoplanets were added to the tally, two of which are very similar to Earth and thus could support alien life.
Astronomers have discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a new exoplanet - a planet from outside our solar system - roughly the size of Neptune, orbiting a star 124 light-years away. This is the first time water vapor has been found on an alien planet smaller than Jupiter. The discovery is set to improve scientists' understanding of how planet forms and which planets may be best suited to support alien life.
Until just a few decades ago, there wasn’t any proof that there were any planets beyond those in our solar system, although of course everybody expected them to exist somewhere. After the Kepler Space Telescope was deployed, astronomers found not one, but a couple hundred exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars). In fact, our galaxy is […]
A team of astronomers recently discovered a new exoplanet some 200 light years away whose mass is about the same as Earth’s – the first Earth-mass planet that transits, or crosses in front of, its host star. Although very similar in mass, the planet is 60% larger in diameter suggesting it has a thick atmosphere. […]
Although the Kepler Space Telescope itself is defunct due to a malfunction that rendered it out of operation some months ago, the mission goes on as scientists churn through massive amounts of data gathered by Kepler, enough to keep them busy for years to come. One of the fruits of Kepler is an exoplanet called Kepler […]
A new alien planet has been found by astronomers who have a novel planet hunting method which makes good use of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The newly found exoplanet is slightly larger than Jupiter and is the first such planet found with this method. The planet orbits a star in the constellation Cygnus, about […]
The ever resourceful Kepler mission has recently unveiled several new possible Earth-like planet candidates, two of whom are favored by scientists with the best odds yet of supporting alien life. The pair actually orbits around the same star, called Kepler 62, after NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which is smaller and dimmer than our own star. Kepler 62 […]
After researchers surveyed data from the Kepler mission tasked with identifying possibly habitable planets outside our solar system they found that 6% of red dwarfs – the most common type of planets – are within this zone. This new adjustment would mean that the nearest Earth-like planet might lie just 13 light years away. Astronomers […]
The Kepler mission has proven to be invaluable to science today thanks to its formidable discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. It’s rather remarkable how scientists can tell so much from so little, like the size, mass, orbit and sometimes even composition of a distant planet all by analyzing light. On other hand, it’s frustrating […]
Astronomers working on the Kepler telescope believe that every 1 in 6 stars hosts at least an Earth-sized planet in a close orbit, raising the number of such planets in our galaxy to 17 billion. Finding planets Astrophysicists also announced 461 new planet candidates discovered by the telescope; this raises the number of planets discovered […]
Researchers at MIT, the University of California at Santa Cruz and other institutions have come across the first exoplanetary system, whose planets exhibit a regularly aligned orbit, after analyzing data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. So far, other discovered exoplanetary systems had planets, particularly hot-Jupiters, which presented far more eccentric orbits. Our solar system is comprised of eight […]
Kepler, a space telescope on a mission to find alien planets by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, has come across a fantastic discovery. Two planets orbiting a distant star, which are closer to one another than any other two planets discovered thus far. Apparently, from the surface of the smaller planet, […]
Our solar system is special for two reasons: the first one, obviously – is us. Our solar system is the only one we know of so far that hosts life. The second one is the number of planets – no other solar system that we’ve seen until now had as many planets as ours, but […]
In our very own Milky Way galaxy alone, astronomers estimate there are between 200 billion and 400 billion stars. Of these, there are many that exoplanets within their solar systems. Still, what are the odds planets, more or less similar to our one, capable of supporting life, microscopic or otherwise, exist? This is the exact […]
This news couldn’t have come any sooner. It was just last week that we reported how gamers made a monumental breakthrough by helping solve a decade old problem in less than ten days in a fantastic collective effort via an online game, leading to significant advances to AIDS treatment research. Now, NASA has confirmed two […]
A remarkable discovery which turns once again turns fiction into reality, the Kepler spacecraft has found the first confirmed planet to orbit around two suns, much like the iconic Tatooine in the Star Wars Universe. It’s by no means habitable, however. Located 200 light years from Earth and the size of Jupiter, the planet dubbed […]
Kepler 19c, an invisible world, was discovered solely through the gravitational influence it has on its companion world, Kepler 19b. Nothing else is known about it, other that it exists. When you’re five minutes late, a lot of bad things can happen. You can miss an appointment, lose reservations, or just annoy people; but when […]
Yes, you’ve read that right. There are over 50 billion planets in our galaxy alone, according to the Kepler telescope, scientists now estimate that not only there are over 500 bilion planets in the galaxy, but that there are over 500 million life-cable planets out there as well. These numbers obviously come from Nasa’s own […]
The Goldilocks area is one of the most interesting for astronomers throughout the known Universe, as it has great hope for finding planets similar to our Earth. The Kepler 10b planet is not the most hospitable one you could think of: located some 560 million light years away from our planet, and with a surface […]
Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]
