The Kepler telescope, which has been looking for planets outside our solar system, has found a new rocky planet a bit like a scorched molten Earth. It orbits around a sun like star called Kepler-10 in only 45 days. It is so close to its parent star it is not expected to have any liquid [...]
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Kepler Finds a Multitude of Planets of All Shapes and Structures
Some great news from the planet front has just arrived. As was expected Kepler has found lots of new planets. These planets are really planetary candidates and have to be positively confirmed but a high percentage definitely will be planets. The recent findings increase the number of planets found by Kepler to 1235. 68 of [...]
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Rocky Planet Found by Kepler Gets Us Closer to Finding an Earthlike Planet
The race to find an earthlike planet hots up with the Kepler space telescope finding a rocky planet. I say race because the telescope that finds an earthlike planet will enter the history books. This planet orbits a sun like star. The planet is only 40% larger than Earth (all the previous ones were the size [...]
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Kepler Mission Releases New Planets the Size of Earth and Above
Kepler is a mission to study 156,000 stars using the Kepler telescope up there in space. 706 target data has been released in a report but 400 have not. The exoplanets found have sizes from as small as Earth to as large as Jupiter. They have also found five multi planet systems which sound quite [...]
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Ceres, Dwarf Planet or Asteroid?
In the previous post I made a mistake about Ceres and its classification as an asteroid or dwarf planet. It’s been a topic of debate for some time, the debate originating with Pluto and its classification from planet to perhaps an asteroid and back to dwarf planet. Everybody was once sitting pretty thinking that Pluto [...]
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Best of the Week Podcast- A Man, A Planet and Loads of Controversy
ENCORE While the Kepler spacecraft hunts for habitable planets beyond the solar system, we’ve let one of our own planets slip away! Find out why Pluto’s demotion to dwarf status created a public uproar as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson reads us his hate mail. From third-graders! Also, how we might find Earth-like planets… the possibility [...]
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Kepler, Finding New Planets & Adopting A Star.
On my voyage across the Internet I bumped into something that I had been thinking about for a long time. Name a star was high up on my list of things that I must do but never got round to because I just really didn’t want to get conned. Well, I took the leap and [...]
