NASA X-ray Telescope Observes Planet Passing in Front of its Star for the First Time, NASA “For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star. An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth, […]

Kepler Mission Manager Update: Preparing for Recovery, NASA “The engineering team has devised initial tests for the recovery attempt and is checking them on the spacecraft test bed at the Ball Aerospace facility in Boulder, Colo. The team anticipates that exploratory commanding of Kepler’s reaction wheels will commence mid-to-late July. The Kepler spacecraft will remain in PRS until and during the tests. Later this month, an update to the data […]

Kepler Delivers More Data for Exoplanet Hunters, NASA Ames Research Center “On May 28 NASA’s Kepler mission delivered new data to the NASA Exoplanet Archive for Exoplanet hunters to dig into. At the same, NASA Ames Research Center’s Michele Johnson sat down with Michael Haas, Kepler science office director, for an interview to find out more.” Marc’s note: The data includes 1,924 Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) that have not […]

Earth-like Planets Are Right Next Door, SpaceRef “Using publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets. Since red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy, the closest Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away.” Six Percent of Red Dwarf Stars Have Earth-sized Planets “Using publicly available […]

Exoplanets: Show me the data!, Nature “And according to NASA Watch, the NASA astrophysics division is prohibiting discussion of the new 306 candidate planets until they are confirmed, even though they are now out in the public; the NASA press release associated with the data dump makes no mention of the 306 new candidates.” Kepler Craft Reports Apparent Planetary Bonanza, Science News “The newly reported findings don’t include details about […]