Kepler breaks new ground August 8, 2009
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, science, space . 2comments
Kepler launched in March 2009
The IAU General Assembly in Rio may well be the heart of the action in astronomy at the moment, but the rest of the world has not stopped either. Yesterday NASA announced the first results from its planet-hunting satellite Kepler, which was launched in March of this year. As I was holed up at the conference I wasn’t able to follow the news conference, but I gather the results are really excellent and very exciting already at this early stage of the mission. The bottom line: based on first data, Kepler is performing extremely well and is capable of detecting Earth-like exoplanets. This is a major achievement for all scientists and engineers involved, who I am sure will be delighted with these data.
Professor Astronomy in Texas has a full overview of the results presented by NASA, and plenty of expertise to put it all into context. Follow the jump for the full lowdown!
Image: NASA/K. Shiflett
Kepler sees the light April 20, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science, space . 2comments
First light images from NASA’s Kepler space telescope were released last week following the satellite’s sucecssful launch on March 7. The picture shown here shows an (inversted) image of the starfield Kepler will be studying over the course of its exoplanet-finding mission, in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Galaxy. It may not look like much, but for the Kepler team it’s pretty special to see that their satellite is alive and well, and performing as it should. Congrats!
Go here for the full set of first light images.
Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Off she goes! March 8, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentKepler’s launch was a sucecss, yay! Watch a video of it below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g44uA8kKwQ]
Countdown to Kepler March 3, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a comment
Astronomers’ eyes are on NASA this week as the agency aims to launch its mission for tracking down Earth-like exoplanets on Friday night (early Saturday morning if you’re in Europe). Over its three-year lifetime, Kepler will observe over 100,000 stars in a small part of the sky, over and over again to spot the tiny dips in brightness caused by a planet casting its shadow onto the star as it passes in front of it. Together with its European cousin CoRoT, which has been in orbit for a while already, Kepler is likely to increase our tally of known exoplanets by a factor of many. There’s been a ton of great media coverage about Kepler already so I’ll round up a few nice links here. And there’ll be much more to follow!
From NASA itself: the mission homepage, launch schedule. A live launch blog will appear here 2 hours before launch.
Follow Kepler on Twitter.
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute gives his perspective on Discovery Space. Discovery Space have a little Kepler-themed area even, here.
A BBC story on British industrial involvement in Kepler.
[Update 04/03]
Director of Hubble news Ray Villard (Cosmic Ray) gives his perspective.
A news story in Nature.
Image credit: Ball Aerospace
Super-earth confirmed, first of many? February 3, 2009
Posted by sarah in: science . 9comments
Today with much to-do and under heavy embargoes, scientists have announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet with a mass diameter of just 1.7 times that of the Earth. That’s very very small. With a mass of It whizzes around its host star, Exo-7, in around 20 hours and with a temperature of over 1,000 degrees, is incredibly hot. Using data from the satellite CoRoT (Convection Rotation and planetray Transits), the German-led French-led team of scientists detected the minute dip in the light coming from the host star from the planet passing in front of it. The discovery was confirmed with observations at a number of ground-based observatories, including VLT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, McDonald Observatory.
In case you hadn’t noticed: exoplanet news is coming hard and fast. Every year since 1995, when Mayor & Queloz reported the discovery of 51 Peg b, has seen a number of “major breakthroughs” (see here, here, and many more) in the detection and characterisation of planets around other stars in our Galaxy. Scientists have pushed the boundaries of our knowledge to a massive extent, and the rapid progress is just fantastic. But brace yourself for more.
