NASA’s Kepler witnesses vampire star system undergoing super-outburst

Science

by differentimpulse - January 24, 2020

NASA's Kepler spacecraft was designed to find exoplanets by looking for stars that dim as a planet crosses the star's face. Fortuitously, the same design makes it ideal for spotting other astronomical transients—objects that brighten or dim over time. A new search of Kepler archival data has uncovered an unusual

The low density of some exoplanets is confirmed

Science

by differentimpulse - June 24, 2019

An artist's depiction of the stellar system Kepler-9 and two of its planets. Astronomers have confirmed the very low densities of two of Kepler-9's planets using both transit-timing and radial velocity methods. Credit: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, Ames Research Center

The Kepler mission and its extension, called K2, discovered thousands of exoplanets. It detected them using the transit technique, measuring the dip in light intensity whenever an orbiting planet moved across the face of its host star as viewed from Earth.Transits can not only measure the orbital period, they often

New algorithm digs up 18 Earth-like exoplanets from old Kepler data

Science

by Megan Williamson - May 24, 2019May 28, 2019

An artist's impression of an Earth-sized exoplanet

So far almost 4,000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun, and that tally is constantly growing. Now another 18 exoplanets have been added to the haul, but the difference this time is that all of them are roughly Earth-sized – much smaller than the Neptune-sized average

NASA to Make Announcement About Kepler Telescope

Science

by David Harris - October 30, 2018

An illustration of the Kepler space telescope.

NASA is about to make an announcement about the Kepler, potentially to say the planet-hunting telescope has finally run out of fuel almost a decade after being launched into space.A tweet from the agency that in the teleconference, it will “provide an update on the status” of the telescope, and

Last gasp? NASA fires up fading Kepler telescope for Campaign 19

Science

by differentimpulse - September 6, 2018September 6, 2018

Kepler's fuel stocks are dwindling, but there may be life left in it yet

Although the science mission of its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is now underway, NASA isn't done with the Kepler Space Telescope just yet. Its scientists have awoken the deep space probe to gather scientific data yet again, though with an unknown amount of fuel and a compromised