Tag: planethunt

From exoplanets to supernovae discoveries, a spacecraft’s second life continues to shine as K2.

NASA astronauts “use the force” every time they launch … from a certain point of view. We have real-world droids and ion engines. We’ve seen dual-sun planets like Tatooine and a moon that eerily resembles the Death Star.

The fantasy creations of the “Star Wars” universe are strikingly similar to real planets in our own Milky Way galaxy.

This illustration shows a cool star, called W1906+40, marked by a raging storm near one of its poles.

A star the size of Jupiter has a raging, giant storm.

New clues emerge in the mystery of a star with odd light patterns.

Astronomers have detected the first planetary object transiting a white dwarf using data from the K2 mission, confirming a decade-old theory.

Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study, when our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago only eight percent of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed.

This artistic animation depicts one possible appearance of the planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of star that is similar to our sun. The planet’s rotation is sped up.

Kepler planet candidates by size as of July 2015.

The tightly packed system, named Kepler-444, is home to five small planets in very compact orbits that formed when the Milky Way galaxy was a youthful two billion years old.

Scientists were excited to discover clear skies on a relatively small planet, about the size of Neptune, using the combined power of NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The view from this planet — were it possible to fly a spaceship into its gaseous layers — is illustrated at right.

On May 28, 2013, NASA’s Kepler mission delivered new data to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.