Among the roughly 10 billion white dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a greater number than previously expected could ...

“The three previously known planets that orbit the star Kepler-51 are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.” What makes the ...

Keep your eye on the ball” is a motto for many athletes—and for astronomers trying to find Earth-threatening space rocks ...

To find a planet on an orbit similar to our own, Kepler would have to monitor the star for several years to confirm that the dips repeated. Scaled up, that meant that Kepler needed to watch one ...

To see this, recall the definition of angular momentum: Kepler's second law states that the area swept out by the line connecting the satellite to the Earth's center over a given time Δt is a constant ...

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

Kepler-62f (also known by its Kepler Object ... But Kane warns that any small adjustments to the orbit and “things would go poorly.” In iterations where the additional planet didn’t ...

As of early 2012, Kepler has uncovered 17 stars with multiple planets as well as a new class of planets that orbit double and even triple stars. But only a handful of the exoplanets discovered so ...

Moreover, with truly prescient insight, Kepler suggested that the planets were kept in orbit by a force emanating from the sun itself. This radical idea was eventually demonstrated by Isaac ...

He works at the Kepler Science Office on the whole instrument/detector ... The discovery of thousands of worlds around other stars has shown that planets orbit most of the stars in our Galaxy. But how ...