Remove this ad

Kepler

Habitable Worlds? New Kepler Planetary Systems in Images

April 18, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter The Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. The Kepler-62 [...]

Read the full article →

Kepler Team Finds System with Two Potentially Habitable Planets

April 18, 2013

This might be the most exciting exoplanet news yet. An international team of scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Kepler mission has found a planetary system with two small, potentially rocky planets that lie within the habitable zone of their star. The star, Kepler-62, is a bit smaller and cooler than our Sun, and is home [...]

Read the full article →

Kepler’s Weirdest Exoplanets

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Earthlike Exoplanets Are All Around Us

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Kepler Spacecraft Back in Action After Reaction Wheel Problem

January 30, 2013

There has been some concern about the Kepler spacecraft after one of the devices that provide the ability for super-precise pointing began misbehaving. Reaction wheels are devices which aim a spacecraft in different directions without firing rockets or jets, which reduces the amount of fuel a spacecraft needs; Kepler has four of them. Earlier this [...]

Read the full article →
Remove this ad

← Previous Entries