Remove this ad

Extrasolar Planets

Blocking Light Sheds New Light on Exoplanet Atmospheres

May 16, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Exoplanets are uncanny. Some seem to have walked directly out of the best science-fiction movies. For example, we’ve discovered a planet consisting purely of water (GJ 1214b) and one with two suns (Kepler 16b). Some planets nearly scrape their host stars once [...]

Read the full article →

More Insight on How NASA Might Revive the Kepler Space Telescope

May 16, 2013

The future of NASA’s Kepler space telescope mission is in doubt, NASA announced yesterday, as it suffered a failure of a second reaction wheel, losing its ability to precisely point to look for planets orbiting other stars. Reaction wheels enable the spacecraft to aim in different directions without firing thrusters, and the spacecraft needs at [...]

Read the full article →

Using the Theory of Relativity and BEER to Find Exoplanets

May 13, 2013

A new method of detecting alien worlds is full of awesome, as it combines Einstein’s Theory of Relativity along with BEER. No, not the weekend beverage of choice, but the relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations algorithm. This new way of finding exoplanets was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at [...]

Read the full article →

Hubble Observes Planet-”Polluted” Dead Stars In Hyades

May 10, 2013

For those of us who practice amateur astronomy, we’re very familiar with the 150 light-year distant Hyades star cluster – one of the jewels in the Taurus crown. We’ve looked at it countless times, but now the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken its turn observing and spotted something astronomers weren’t expecting – the debris [...]

Read the full article →

Watch Live Hangout: TESS and the Search for Exoplanets

May 1, 2013

Last month, NASA announced plans to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2017. This is a satellite that will perform an all-sky survey to discover transiting exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the Sun’s neighborhood. “TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky [...]

Read the full article →
Remove this ad

← Previous Entries