March 7, 2013
Captain Kirk has nothing on the “strange new worlds” the Kepler space telescope has found. NASA’s planet-probing orbiting observatory launched its quest to find more Earths four years ago this week. Since then, it’s found thousands of planets ranging from ginormous gas giants to tiny rocky worlds that are even smaller than our planet. NASA [...]
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February 6, 2013
Artist’s impression of a rocky planet orbiting a red dwarf. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA) We may literally be surrounded by potentially habitable exoplanets, according to new research by a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Using data gathered by NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, the CfA researchers discovered that many red dwarf stars harbor planets, and [...]
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