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 [...]
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Using A Laser To Communicate With Aliens
A communication strategy that aliens might use instead of radio signals is to send brief and intense bursts of laser light across the galaxy – sort of like a signal lamp between two ships. Some space telescopes would be ideally suited to pluck out such a signal from the sky background. Why laser beams instead of radio transmitters? [...]
