NASA bid a bittersweet farewell to its Kepler spacecraft in October. During its nine-and-a-half year journey, the space telescope spotted more than 2,600 planets outside of our solar system. Not bad for a mission that was initially expected to last 3...
Kepler beams back final image from its almost decade-long journey
NASA bid a bittersweet farewell to its Kepler spacecraft in October. During its nine-and-a-half year journey, the space telescope spotted more than 2,600 planets outside of our solar system. Not bad for a mission that was initially expected to last 3...
"There are great possibilities in expanding the habitable zone beyond our traditional blinders on that vision where it's Earth or nothing."
That's Dr. Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's currently worki...
Scientists say it's possible five Earth-sized planets orbiting Trappist-1, an ultra-cool dwarf star located 39 light years away, contain "significant amounts of water." An international team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to mea...
We hate to further quash hopes that the TRAPPIST-1 star system can harbor life, but... it's not looking great. Researchers have determined that the dwarf star is between 5.4 billion years old and 9.8 billion years old, or considerably older than the...
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found the smallest star ever discovered. It's just slightly bigger than Saturn and while its mass is similar to that of TRAPPIST-1 -- which NASA recently found seven Earth-sized planets rotating around...
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today that it is officially adopting the PLATO mission. PLATO, which stands for PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, is a planet-hunting project that will look for Earth twins -- planets just like ou...
After its discovery, Trappist-1 instantly became one of the most interesting stars in the Milky Way, with seven Earth-sized planets including three in the life-supporting "habitable zone." But, why did the planets form in such uniform Earth-like size...
NASA was quick to offer conceptual images of Trappist-1 and its abundance of Earth-sized planets. But what does the star system look like, really? At last, now we know... sort of. As part of a raw data release, NASA has offered a simple, 11-by-11...
It was a stellar week for spheroids, both the physical and metaphorical varieties. NASA discovered seven new planets (three of which are habitable) just 40 light years away. Ants on golf balls are teaching scientists about insectoid navigation skills...
Scientists from MIT and the University of Liège studying a planetary system orbiting the star TRAPPIST–1 have discovered two rocky, Earth-like and potentially habitable planets only 40 light years away from home. According to a paper pub...