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Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet, Caltech “Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the distant solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the Sun at an average distance of […]

The Milky Way Contains At Least 100 Billion Planets According to Survey “Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three extrasolar planets by an observational technique called microlensing. Kailash Sahu, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is part of an international team reporting today that our galaxy contains a minimum of one […]

NASA’s Kepler Confirms Its First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-Like Star “NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up […]

Planet Hunters Finds Extrasolar Planets Via Crowdsourced Effort – Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data, MNRAS – From the Comfort of Home, Web Users May Have Found New Planets, Yale University Think about this: One would think that with this announcement – one that comes on the heels of the Tatooine discovery last week – that the Kepler team […]

Kepler Mission Manager Update – Kepler Returns to Science “After a safe mode event that lasted 144 hours, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft returned to science data collection at 2:45 p.m. EDT Sunday, March 20. During the spacecraft’s recovery from the safe mode event, the project team performed the spring quarterly roll and downloaded science data collected since Feb. 4 from the spacecraft’s solid-state recorder. That data will be sent to the […]

Kepler Mission Discovers its First Rocky Planet “NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system. The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.”