Announcements

How to Learn a Star’s True Age

Project News • May 23rd, 2011

For many movie stars, their age is a well-kept secret. The same is true of stars in space. Like our Sun, most stars look almost the same for most of their lives. So how can we tell if a star is one billion or 10 billion years old? Astronomers may have found a solution – measuring the star’s spin.

Kepler-10c and a New Method to Validate Planets

Project News • May 23rd, 2011

Kepler has discovered a second planet in the Kepler-10 star system: Kepler-10c with a radius of 2.2 times that of Earth's, and it orbits the star every 45 days.

WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

Project News • April 14th, 2011

Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Kepler Listens to an Orchestra of Solar-Type Stars

Project News • April 7th, 2011

An international team of asteroseismologists, led by the University of Birmingham, has used data from the NASA Kepler Mission to sample the ‘stellar music’ of 500 stars similar to the Sun, according to research published today (8 April 2011) in the journal Science.

Echoes from the depth of a red giant star

Project News • April 7th, 2011

Continuation of news item from 2011 March 17. Science article: Kepler Detected Gravity-Mode Period Spacings in a Red Giant Star, by P. G. Beck et al. - Asteroseismic observations with the Kepler satellite probed the deep interior of an evolved star.

Kepler Discovery of a Unique Triply Eclipsing Triple Star

Project News • April 7th, 2011

Star HD 181068 , a 7th magnitude star almost visible to the naked eye is in reality a complex triple system in which three stars undergo mutual eclipses as each of the stars gets behind or in front of the others. The most luminous object is a red giant star around which a close pair of two red...

Giant Stars Reveal Their Inner Secrets for the First Time

Project News • March 30th, 2011

University of Sydney astrophysicists are behind a major breakthrough in the study of stars known as red giants, finding a way to peer deep into their cores to discover which ones are in early infancy, which are fresh-faced teenagers, and which facing their dying days.

Astronomers Detect Echoes from the Depth of a Red Giant Star

Project News • March 17th, 2011

Today an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of waves inside a star that travel so deep that they reach the core. The discovery was possible thanks to precise measurements with the Kepler space telescope.

Can WISE Find the Hypothetical 'Tyche'?

Project News • February 18th, 2011

In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" -- a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of...

NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in Habitable Zone, Six Planet System

Project News • February 1st, 2011

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars...