ExoPlanets
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NASA
Talented Teams Tackle Toasty Planet
Exoplanets, look out! Two NASA-funded teams of amateur astronomers are tracking you with their backyard telescopes. These two teams, called UNITE (UNISTELLAR Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets) and Exoplanet Watch, have combined forces to confirm a new planetary discovery—a toasty “warm Jupiter”. “I pinch myself every day when I recall that I have made a meaningful scientific contribution to astronomy by helping professional astronomers confirm…
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NASA
More Planets than Stars: Kepler’s Legacy
The Kepler mission enabled the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, revealing a deep truth about our place in the cosmos: there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The road to this fundamental change in our understanding of the universe, however, required almost 20 years of persistence before the mission became a reality with its selection in 2001. The Kepler…
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Artificial Intelligence, NASA Data Used to Discover Eighth Planet Circling Distant Star
Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days…
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