Project News

Kepler’s Astounding Haul of Multiple Planet Systems

Kepler • 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...

How to Learn a Star’s True Age

Kepler • 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...

WISE Delivers Millions of Galaxies, Stars, Asteroids

Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer • 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...

Echoes from the depth of a red giant star

Kepler • 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...

Kepler Listens to an Orchestra of Solar-Type Stars

Kepler • 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...

Kepler Discovery of a Unique Triply Eclipsing Triple Star

Kepler • 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...

Giant Stars Reveal Their Inner Secrets for the First Time

Kepler • 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...

Astronomers Detect Echoes from the Depth of a Red Giant Star

Kepler • 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...

Can WISE Find the Hypothetical 'Tyche'?

Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer • 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...

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

Kepler • 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...