Related topics: nasa · stars · planets

New branch in family tree of exoplanets discovered

Since the mid-1990s, when the first planet around another sun-like star was discovered, astronomers have been amassing what is now a large collection of exoplanets—nearly 3,500 have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led ...

A catalog of habitable zone exoplanets

The last two decades have seen an explosion of detections of exoplanets, as the sensitivity to smaller planets has dramatically improved thanks especially to the Kepler mission. These discoveries have found that the frequency ...

Finally, an explanation for the "alien megastructure?"

Back in October of 2015, astronomers shook the world when they reported how the Kepler mission had noticed a strange and sudden drop in brightness coming from KIC 8462852 (aka. Tabby's Star). This was followed by additional ...

Distant star is roundest object ever observed in nature

Stars are not perfect spheres. While they rotate, they become flat due to the centrifugal force. A team of researchers around Laurent Gizon from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen ...

NASA missions harvest a passel of 'pumpkin' stars

Astronomers using observations from NASA's Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the sun. The stars, which spin ...

Kepler gets the 'big picture' of comet 67P

On Sept. 30, the European Space Agency concluded its Rosetta mission and the study of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. During the final month of the mission, NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft had a unique opportunity ...

Who else is looking for new worlds around Proxima Centauri?

Finding exoplanets is hard work. In addition to requiring seriously sophisticated instruments, it also takes teams of committed scientists; people willing to pour over volumes of data to find the evidence of distant worlds. ...

Earth-like planet around Proxima Centauri discovered

The hunt for exoplanets has been heating up in recent years. Since it began its mission in 2009, over four thousand exoplanet candidates have been discovered by the Kepler mission, several hundred of which have been confirmed ...

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