This orbit would enable Kepler to keep itself trained on the specific point in the sky that had been chosen for its studies. On April 7, 2009 the telescope cover was jettisoned and Kepler achieved ...

Our quest to find a “second Earth” has long occupied scientists and dreamers alike. The possibility of another world ...

Planets change orbit shape around Neptune’s size. Metal-rich stars help giant planets form. Eccentric orbits suggest chaotic planet formation.

The $488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe ...

It’s now been a few months since the Kepler space telescope bit the dust, but the work it did will still have an impact for a long time to come. In a new post, NASA reveals the telescope’s ...

Among these, about 11 billion orbit stars similar to our Sun, suggesting a high likelihood of extraterrestrial life. Every star likely has at least one planet The Kepler telescope's data indicates ...

The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star.

The telescope watches a section of the sky and ... of all the data its collected before powering down forever. Kepler’s orbit is far out enough that it will never return to Earth or get close ...

Together with precise optical ranging between selected satellites, this provides orbit determination capabilities with unprecedented accuracy. The Kepler infrastructure thus consists of three main ...

while Kepler-62's exoplanet has a 155-day rotation period. While both planets would likely be locked into a synchronous orbit -- with a permanent dayside and a perpetual nightside -- the ultrafast ...