Anyone else facing such relentless misfortune would have been consumed by despair. And yet, he changed the course of human ...

Last year, astronomers discovered an unusual Earth-size exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its ...

Scientists have long overlooked white dwarfs as hosts for habitable exoplanets, assuming their lack of fusion would make life ...

“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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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