Kepler Mission

With thousands of exoplanets confirmed, it's now possible to learn something about how they are organized. An international team of scientists has found that exoplanets revolving around the same star show a pattern of similar sizes and regular orbital spacing.

Data from the Kepler Space Telescope has revealed the Kepler-90 system​ ties with our own for the most number of planets known to orbit a single star. The discovery of an eighth exoplanet, Kepler-90i, was achieved using artificial intelligence software.

Thousands of exoplanets have been spotted by looking for “transits” as light from the host star dips when a planet passes in front of it. Now scientists have examined whether Earth could be detected by other civilizations using the same technique, and 68 known exoplanets are in prime positions.

The Kepler Space Telescope is not only a dab hand at finding exoplanets, it's also revealing the secrets of the Seven Sisters, also known as the Pleiades, thanks to Kepler's instruments combined with algorithms devised by a team from Aarhus University.

​NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has discovered more than two thousand exoplanets since launching seven years ago, and a newly compiled catalogue of candidates could soon give this tally a sizeable boost.

A new study using data from prolific exoplanet hunting telescope Kepler has filled in some of the blanks on the TRAPPIST-1 system's outermost planet bringing to light new information on its orbit, temperature and chances of hosting life. ​

Over the last 20 years we've discovered over 3,600 exoplanets, and some of these are far crazier than we could've imagined. Suddenly Earth seems pretty boring, so let’s take a quick tour of some of the most bizarre exoplanets that have been spotted so far.

​Lately it seems like everyone has been discovering new exoplanets. With a citizen science project called Exoplanet Explorers anyone can comb through Kepler Space Telescope data to identify exoplanets – and within just two days, the crowdsourced effort found a system with four super-Earths.

It's entirely possibly that winds are blowing clouds made of rubies and sapphires on the blazing "hot Jupiter" planet HAT-P-7b​ over 1,000 light years away. ​

A team of astronomers has found a star 5,000 light years away from us that's not only much rounder than the Earth, but is rounder than any natural object in the Universe.

Astronomers have discovered a batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels from our Sun. The stars, which spin so fast they've been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes, are thought to be the result of close binary systems where two sun-like stars merge.

​​The star at the heart of the “alien megastructure” controversy that gripped the internet in 2015, has been observed to dim dramatically over a period of just four years according to a new study making use of data collected by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.