Related topics: nasa · stars · planets

How NASA revived the Kepler Space Telescope

(Phys.org) —You may have thought that NASA's Kepler spacecraft was finished. Well, think again. A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again.

The most mysterious star in the cosmos

Round 5 a.m. on a Tuesday this past May, Tabetha "Tabby" Boyajian sat staring at a laptop, cross-legged on her couch in the living room of her Baton Rouge, La., home. The coffee table was cluttered with the artifacts of an ...

3 Questions: Sara Seager on discovering a trove of new planets

NASA’s Kepler -- an orbiting, planet-finding telescope launched in 2009 -- has dramatically increased the discovery rate of planets around stars other than the sun, known as exoplanets. Before Kepler, there were a total ...

What are extrasolar planets?

For countless generations, human beings have looked out at the night sky and wondered if they were alone in the universe. With the discovery of other planets in our solar system, the true extent of the Milky Way galaxy, and ...

NASA designs new space telescope optics

Although hundreds of planets orbiting other stars have been discovered in the past 15 years, we cannot yet answer the age-old question of whether any of these planets are capable of sustaining life. However, new NASA technology ...

Measuring the mass of a Mars-size exoplanet

Determining the size of an Earth-size exoplanet by the amount of starlight it blocks hundreds of light-years away once was the realm of science fiction. Measuring the mass of such a small planet based on its gravity was ...

How common are earths around small stars?

(Phys.org) —The Kepler mission has revolutionized the study of exoplanet statistics by increasing the number of known extrasolar planets and planet candidates by a factor of five, and by discovering systems with longer ...

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