After nine years, NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission came to a final end Thursday as the space agency sent the radio commands ordering the onboard computer to shut down the unmanned space telescope's systems.
Continue Reading
Astronomers have discovered a super-Earth located just six light-years from our planet, orbiting the nearest lone star to our Sun. Named for its parent star, the exoplanet Barnard's Star b has a mass roughly 3.2 times that of the Earth, and has a frigid surface temperature of -170 °C (-274 °F).
Continue Reading
Whether there’s life beyond Earth is one of the most profound questions we can ask. Making ourselves easier to find could be part of our first contact strategy. A new MIT study outlines a way to use existing or near-future tech to build a kind of laser lighthouse to signal to our cosmic neighbors.
Continue Reading
A new exoplanet hunting tool has been installed onto an Australian telescope. Dubbed Veloce, the instrument looks out for the wobble of a star caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets, and it specializes in red dwarfs, the most common type of star in the universe.
Continue Reading
The pioneering planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has finally reached the end of its service life and will be switched off permanently. NASA announced today that the aging, unmanned spacecraft has run out of the propellant needed to keep it from tumbling and must be retired.
Continue Reading
The majority of stars in our Milky Way aren’t Sun-like – they’re the smaller and cooler red dwarfs. To determine how well these stars might be able to support life, A NASA program is using Hubble to monitor their flare activity, and the first results don’t paint a positive picture.
Continue Reading
Although it’s basically a sure thing that exomoons are out there, astronomers haven’t been able to spot any – until now. Scientists using NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes have found evidence of a large moon orbiting a gas giant planet some 8,000 light-years away.
Continue Reading
NASA today shared the first science image captured by its TESS space telescope, providing researchers with plenty of inspiration in their search for other worlds that might resemble our own.
Continue Reading
On June 6, 2018, NASA announced that the Kepler space observatory was reaching the end of its life.Now that Kepler is approaching its final days, let's look back at its remarkable nine-year career and how it has changed our views about the universe.
Continue Reading
A new report mandated by the US Congress recommends that NASA should embark on a new tranche of exoplanet missions to determine if the solar system is a rarity and whether life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Continue Reading
See the stories that matter in your inbox every morning