The Kepler Mission has detected the possible transits of several hundred potential super-Earth - and Earth - sized
planets around distant stars (more).
Autonomous telescope joins hunt for alien planets and has already found new
planets around distant stars.
It has been used to detect
planets around distant stars within the Milky Way galaxy, and was among the first methods used to confirm Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Its discovery proved that the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in March 2009, could indeed do what its designers had boldly promised: find small, Earth - size
planets around distant stars, a task that once seemed so difficult as to border on the absurd.
Discoveries of
planets around distant stars have become almost routine.
Not exact matches
In a few thousand years of recorded history, we went from dwelling in caves and mud huts and tee - pees, not understanding the natural world
around us, or the broader universe, to being able to travel through space, using reason to ferret out the hidden secrets of how the world works, from physics to chemistry to biology, we worked out the tools and rules underpinning it all, mathematics, and now we can see objects that are almost impossibly small, the very tiniest building blocks of matter, (or at least we can examine them, even if you can't «see» them because you're using something other than your eyes and photons to view them) to the very farthest objects, the
planets circling other,
distant stars, that are in their own way, too small to see from here, like the atoms and parts of atoms themselves, detected indirectly, but indisputably THERE.
As questions swirled
around the existence of extrasolar
planets in the late 1990s, Sara Seager, 36, gambled that these
distant flickers transiting in front of
stars would grow into astronomy's next frontier.
«You build bigger, you go fainter, you go deeper, and you'll have a shot at a major discovery,» explains Pudritz, «So building these larger machines will no doubt allow us to study the birth of the first galaxies and even
planet formation
around distant stars.
On the face of it, detecting a moon
around a
planet orbiting a
distant star seems like a spectacularly difficult task, but with a bit of luck today's technology may be able to do it.
In late 2008 two teams made waves with the simultaneous announcement that they had managed to directly photograph
planets in orbit
around distant stars, also known as exoplanets.
Nesvold and her colleague Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented the findings Thursday during the «In the Spirit of Lyot 2015» conference in Montreal, which focuses on the direct detection of
planets and disks
around distant stars.
Planets around other
stars are too
distant for us to spot their short - term weather.
The day may soon come when astrophysicists announce our
planet's twin
around a
distant star.
The GMT aims to discover Earth - like
planets around nearby
stars and the tiny distortions that black holes cause in the light from
distant stars and galaxies.
Artist's conception of the view of a hypothetical
planet around a
distant red giant
star.
But to fully understand the architecture of
distant planetary systems, astronomers must map the entire distribution of
planets around a
star.
«The ability to see very close to
stars also allows us to search for
planets around more
distant stars, where the
planets and
stars would appear closer together.
After surveying nearly 50
stars from 2008 to 2011, scientists have been able to determine with remarkable precision how much dust is
around distant stars — a big step closer into finding
planets than might harbor life.
Capable of observing the Universe by detecting light that is invisible to the human eye, ALMA will show us never - before - seen details of the birth of
stars, infant galaxies in the early Universe, and
planets coalescing
around distant suns.
Built
around a mysterious, ancient alien artifact that can transport people instantly between
distant planets (that would be the titular Stargate), the flick dabbles in Egyptian mythology; but is mostly an excuse for a rollicking sci - fi adventure
starring Kurt Russell and James Spader at their most fun.
Since then, many hundreds of
planets big and small have been detected
around distant stars.