Announcements

NASA's WISE Finds Earth's First Trojan Asteroid

Project News • July 27th, 2011

Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet....

Gemini Image Captures Elegant Beauty of Planetary Nebula Discovered by Amateur Astronomer

Project News • July 25th, 2011

The new nebula (named Kronberger 61, or Kn 61, after its discoverer) is within a relatively small patch of sky being intensely monitored by NASA’s Kepler planet finding mission.

Kepler-14b, Supergiant, is orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system

Project News • July 20th, 2011

Kepler-14b is a planet 8 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system. The planet has a short orbital period of just 7 days, while the two stars orbit each other with a much longer period of about 2800 years.

Hubble Space Telescope's One Millionth Science Observation is of Kepler-2b

Project News • July 4th, 2011

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope logged its one millionth science observation — a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away. Hubble's millionth exposure is of the planet HAT-P-7b, a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a star hotter than our sun. HAT-P-7b, also...

NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

Project News • June 20th, 2011

The Pleiades supercomputer plays a crucial role in Kepler data analysis. Pleiades now contains 23,296 Intel(R) Xeon(R) quad- and hex-core processors (111,104 cores in 182 racks) that can run at a theoretical peak of approximately 1.32 quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations, per...

NASA’s Kepler Yields the Next Harvest: A bounty of findings delivered at the 218th Meeting of the AAS in Boston

Project News • May 25th, 2011

The Kepler Team had 50 presentations at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Boston, 2011 May 22-26.

Kepler’s Astounding Haul of Multiple Planet Systems

Project News • May 23rd, 2011

Within just the first four months of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft data collection, astronomers have found evidence for more than 1,200 planetary candidates. Of those, 408 reside in systems containing two or more planets, and most of those look very different than our solar system.

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.

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.

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.