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In a clean room inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a petite telescope is perched on a stand for a final series of checkouts prior to launch. The extra fastidiousness is because the observatory’s four cameras will fly without protective covers—one of several simplifying design decisions made to help ensure the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will meet its goal of measuring the masses of at least 50 small, rocky and potentially Earth-like worlds as part of the first all-sky, exoplanet survey. TESS was proposed even before NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, demonstrated...

Explanation: Earth's April showers include the Lyrid Meteor Shower, observed for more than 2,000 years when the planet makes its annual passage through the dust stream of long-period Comet Thatcher. A grain of that comet's dust, moving 48 kilometers per second at an altitude of 100 kilometers or so, is swept up in this night sky view from the early hours of April 21. Flashing toward the southeastern horizon, the meteor's brilliant streak crosses the central region of the rising Milky Way. Its trail points back toward the shower's radiant in the constellation Lyra, high in the northern springtime sky...

The first interesting form is the scorpion, which might first be thought to represent is known as Scorpius, but this does not appear to be the case.  This is due to the presence of the three birds to the middle right (A, B, C), these three most clearly correspond to the “Summer Triangle” stars, the three birds, one represented by each star: Cygnus, Aquila (aka Vultur volans), and Vultur cadens (Lyra).  The shape of the Aquila constellations holds the same general appearance as bird A, the angle of the Cygnus stars matches the shape of the body of bird B,...

The search for Earthlike, habitable planets beyond the Sun has been something like a boulder rolling downhill ever since the Kepler space telescope went into orbit in 2009. Before that, ground-based astronomers had been finding so-called exoplanets one or two at a time, here and there in the cosmos, and pretty much all of them were far too large to be hospitable, or much close to the fires of their parent stars, or, usually, both. -snip- Nobody quite imagined what the Kepler team has just announced, however. Writing in Nature, William Borucki, Kepler’s principal scientist, along with dozens of collaborators,...

A team of astronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars. The group, led by Dr Gracjan Maciejewski of Jena University in Germany, used Transit Timing Variation to detect a planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth in the system WASP-3, 700 light years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra... Transit Timing Variation (TTV) was suggested as a new technique for discovering planets a few years ago....

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 22 M57: The Ring Nebula Credit: H. Bond et al., Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA), NASA Explanation: Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. This planetary nebula's simple, graceful appearance is thought to be due to perspective -- our view from planet Earth looking straight into what is actually a barrel-shaped cloud of gas shrugged...