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Image montage showing the Maunakea Observatories, Kepler Space Telescope, and night sky with K2 Fields and discovered planetary systems (dots) overlaid. An international team of scientists discovered more than 100 planets based on images from Kepler operating in the 'K2 Mission'. The team confirmed and characterized the planets using a suite of telescopes worldwide, including four on Maunakea (the twin telescopes of Keck Observatory, the Gemini­North Telescope, and the Infrared Telescope Facility). The planet image on the right is an artist's impression of a representative planet. Credit: Karen Teramura (UHIfA) based on night sky image of the ecliptic plane by...

Kepler normally makes news for its planetary findings, like this batch of nine planets discovered in a habitable zone of stars where conditions could be right for liquid water, and potentially life. Twitter has a long history of hacks, often targeted at celebrity accounts. A hacker compromised Jack Black's Tenacious D Twitter account earlier this year with a fake death notice sent out to his fans. Other big names, including Katy Perry and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, have also been victimized on the social-media site. NASA's Kepler account seems like an unusual choice for a Twitter hack. "We're investigating the cause...

Astronomers monitoring the Kepler space telescope have detected nearly 1,300 planets flying in orbit around distant stars, a cosmic search that began nearly 10 years ago inside a rusty old telescope dome at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose. From the size and orbits of the new-found “exoplanets,” the astronomers said at least 550 could be rocky planets much like Earth, and at least nine are orbiting at just the right distance from their stars to lie inside their “habitable zones” where temperatures would be just right for liquid water, the one ingredient essential for life to...

Kepler spacecraft is in emergency mode, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a statement. Charlie Sobeck, Kepler and K2 mission manager at NASA's Ames Research Center announced that after a scheduled contact with mission operations engineers last April 7, it was discovered that Kepler is presently in emergency mode (EM), the spacecraft's lowest operational mode. The team is working on recovering from EM, as it consumes significant amount of fuel. Since the spacecraft is 75 million miles away from Earth, even with the speed of light, communication takes about 13 minutes for the message to travel from the...

Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin found the tablet while combing through the collections at the British Museum. The written record gives instructions for estimating the area under a curve by finding the area of trapezoids drawn underneath. Using those calculations, the tablet shows how to find the distance Jupiter has traveled in a given interval of time. Until now, this kind of use of trapezoids wasn't known to exist before the 14th century. ... By 400 B.C. Babylonian astronomers had worked out a coordinate system using the ecliptic, the region of the sky the sun and planets move...

"We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together or alien intelligence," said Dr. Gerald Harp, senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, referring to the baffling light variations seen in the Kepler star KIC 8462852. And he and a team from the Institute are working hard at this moment to determine which of the two it is. Beginning last Friday (Oct. 16), the Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was taken off its normal survey schedule and instead focused on KIC 8462852, one of the 150,000-plus stars studied by NASA's Kepler Mission to...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A white dwarf star in the Constellation Virgo turns out to be a "death star" worthy of "Star Wars." Astronomers announced Wednesday that they have discovered a rocky object coming apart in a death spiral around this distant star. They used NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft to make the discovery, then followed up with ground observations. "This is something no human has seen before," said Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the lead author. "We're watching a solar system get destroyed," he said in a statement.

The paper doesn’t mention aliens, and it doesn’t even imply aliens. Not directly, at least. But the astronomers found a star so odd, with behavior so difficult to explain, that it’s clear something weird is happening there. And some of the astronomers who did the work are now looking into the idea that what they’ve found might (might!) be due to aliens. But don’t let this idea run away with you. The scientists involved are being very skeptical and approaching this the right way. The star is called KIC 8462852, and it’s one of more than a hundred thousand stars...

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another “Earth.” The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet -- of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030. "On the 20th anniversary...

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, despite being hobbled by the loss of critical guidance systems, has discovered a star with three planets only slightly larger than Earth. The outermost planet orbits in the "Goldilocks" zone, a region where surface temperatures could be moderate enough for liquid water and perhaps life, to exist. The star, EPIC 201367065, is a cool red M-dwarf about half the size and mass of our own sun. At a distance of 150 light years, the star ranks among the top 10 nearest stars known to have transiting planets. The star's proximity means it's bright enough for astronomers...

The Kepler space telescope has spotted over 1,000 exoplanets beyond our solar system, and its latest finds are three almost Earth-sized planets, including one in the habitable zone circling the star EPIC 201367075, just 150 light years from Earth. In the cosmic sense, that’s right around the block, making it one of the 10 closest known stars with observed planets in its gravitational hold. Of course, such distances in the cosmic sense also would take many generations to traverse, so don’t invest in real estate there just yet. Still, the relative closeness of this “EPIC” star and its planets provides...

NASA's Kepler space telescope is discovering alien planets again. The prolific spacecraft has spotted its first new alien planet since being hobbled by a malfunction in May 2013, researchers announced Dec. 18. The newly discovered world, called HIP 116454b, is a "super Earth" about 2.5 times larger than our home planet. It lies 180 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pisces — close enough to be studied by other instruments, scientists said. "Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries," study lead author Andrew Vanderburg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...

In another interview with KJRH Tulsa, the couple's 18-year-old daughter, Lisa, says her parents kicked her out a week ago and dropped her off at a homeless shelter, where she met 19-year-old Jeremy Lake and the two began seeing each other. "He was my everything," she said. They spent the week at Jeremy's family's house, which is where her father tracked her down. "We were outside for five minutes and that's when my dad pulled up," she said. "There was no argument. I walked away and Jeremy tried to introduce himself and my dad shot him."

Robert Krulwich/NPRPoor Johannes Kepler. One of the greatest astronomers ever, the man who figured out the laws of planetary motion, a genius, scholar and mathematician — in 1611, he needed a wife. The previous Mrs. Kepler had died of Hungarian spotted fever, so, with kids to raise and a household to manage, he decided to line up some candidates — but it wasn't going very well.Being an orderly man, he decided to interview 11 women. As Alex Bellos describes it in his new book The Grapes of Math, Kepler kept notes as he wooed. It's a catalog of small...

Actual Headline: Mega Discovery! 715 Alien Planets Confirmed Using A New Trick On Old Kepler Data Planet-watchers, some exciting news: you know how we keep talking about planet candidates, those planets that have yet to be confirmed, when we reveal stories about other worlds? That’s because verifying that the slight dimming of a star’s light is due to a planet takes time – -specifically, to have other telescopes verify it through examining gravitational wobbles on the parent star. Turns out there’s a way to solve the so-called “bottleneck” of planet candidates vs. confirmed planets. NASA has made use of a...

You may have thought that NASA's Kepler spacecraft was finished. Well, think again. A repurposed Kepler Space telescope may soon start searching the sky again. A new mission concept, dubbed K2, would continue Kepler's search for other worlds, and introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, young and old stars, active galaxies and supernovae. In May, the Kepler spacecraft lost the second of four gyroscope-like reaction wheels, which are used to precisely point the spacecraft, ending new data collection for the original mission. The spacecraft required three functioning wheels to maintain the precision pointing necessary to detect the signal of...

Launched in March 2009, NASA's Kepler space telescope has detected more than 3,000 potential alien planets. But that exoplanet hunt stalled in mid-May of this year, when the second of Kepler's four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, hobbling the spacecraft. Since then, the Kepler team has been working on possible fixes for the reaction wheels and plans to try them out out in the coming weeks, officials said... Kepler spots exoplanets by noting the telltale brightness dips caused when they cross their parent stars' faces from the instrument's perspective. This is precision work, and the observatory needs three functioning gyroscope-like reaction...

Finding ET in the Data by Paul Gilster on April 17, 2013 As we saw yesterday, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) has been the source of data for a number of searches for unusual infrared signatures. The idea is to look for the artifacts of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, under the assumption that a sufficiently advanced culture will be capable of engineering projects that could be detected from light years away. A Dyson sphere, existing either as a completely enclosed star or as a swarm of artifacts around a star, is but one example of such engineering, but it’s a sensible...

LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Astronomers hunting for Earth-like planets now have many places to look. A new estimate released Monday suggested the Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 17 billion planets similar in size to our planet. It doesn't mean all are potentially habitable, but the sheer number of Earth-size planets is a welcome starting point in the search for worlds like our own. Scientists have yet to find a twin Earth — one that's not only the right size but also located in the so-called Goldilocks zone, a place that's not too hot and not too...

The so-called Republican brain, with its deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence, has played an indispensable role in the making of modern science, long before the emergence of the Grand Old Party. A new term of political opprobrium has been loosed upon the world: anti-science. Like many terms of abuse, it is easier to convey its meaning by an illustration than by a rigorous definition. For example, “If those damn Republicans weren’t so anti-science, we might have a chance of dealing with global warming.” Here’s another example: “Those damn Republicans are so anti-science that they want to see...