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NASA's new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope's extraordinary scientific capabilities. The discovery will be published Friday, Aug. 7, in the journal Science.
The discovery of a giant planet orbiting the tiny star VB10 made headlines earlier this year as the smallest star ever to be found harboring a planet. But Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that the VB10 system could also be a glimpse into the very distant future of our own galaxy.
Hot off the heels of the Kepler mission's first images of the sky, the exoplanet world has been buzzing with new discoveries and tantalizing breakthroughs.
Hot Jupiters are a class of extrasolar planet that orbit their parent stars at very short distances. They are expected to be tidally locked, which can lead to a large temperature difference between their daysides and nightsides. (Scroll down for Abstract)
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to use its last drop of the coolant that has chilled it for the past five-and-a-half years. On about May 12, give or take a week or so, the observatory is predicted to run out of the liquid helium that has run through its veins, keeping its infrared detectors at frosty operating temperatures of just a few degrees above the coldest temperature possible, called absolute zero.
As the Kepler planet-finding mission lifted off into space last month, the planet Saturn and its retinue of moons were giving astronomers a preview of the phenomenon that the spacecraft will use to find Earth-like worlds beyond our solar system.
The International Year of Astronomy is getting into full swing, and one of its flagship events will begin on April 2, when amateur and professional astronomers across the globe will celebrate 100 Hours of Astronomy.
Sean Raymond and his team are not only finding clues to how this mysterious process works, they're also discovering evidence that Earthlike planets may be much more common than was originally thought.
Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy.
William Borucki's interest in space exploration began early, when he and his boyhood friends would launch homemade rockets into the skies of Delavan, a small town in the farmlands of Wisconsin. The local sheriff would close the road so they wouldn't endanger others. "Out where we lived," he says, "the worst thing that could happen is that the rocket might hit a cow on the way down."
Not long ago, the only planets astronomers could find orbiting other stars were massive, gaseous worlds that had more in common with Jupiter than our own small, rocky planet.
COROT has found the smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the Solar System. The amazing planet is less than twice the size of Earth and orbits a Sun-like star.
The search for another planet like our own has led astronomers to probe solar systems hundreds of light years from our own. One group of scientists, though, is hoping to find an Earthlike planet in our own backyard.
