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Articles on Kepler Mission

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An artist’s conception of WASP-18b, a giant exoplanet that orbits very close to its star. X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I.Pillitteri et al; Optical: DSS

A real-life deluminator for spotting exoplanets by reflected starlight

Sometimes it is difficult to take a photograph of an exoplanet because the star illuminating it is too bright. Now there is a new ‘deluminator’ telescope that can block out the extra light.
Imagined view from Kepler-10b, a planet that orbits one of the 150,000 stars that the Kepler spacecraft is monitoring. NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry

Goodbye Kepler, hello TESS: Passing the baton in the search for distant planets

When NASA first started planning the Kepler mission, no one knew if the universe held any planets outside our solar system. Thousands of exoplanets later, the search enters a new phase as Kepler retires.
Artist’s rendition of one of the billions of rocky exoplanets in our galaxy. Did life once exist on its surface? NASA/JPL-Caltech

RIP E.T. – alien life on most exoplanets dies young

Complex life may be rare in the universe because most planets become either too hot or too cold before life has a chance to get a foothold. This might explain why we have yet to bump into E.T.
Is this what we’re seeing around KIC 8462852 - a colossal megastructure built by alien intelligence? Probably not. The reality might be even more interesting. Kevin Gill/Flickr

Whatever the strangest star in the galaxy is, it’s sure to be amazing

There’s a lot of speculation about a star behaving strangely in our galaxy. But even if it’s not evidence of alien intelligence, it’s sure to be an amazing discovery.
Kepler 78b is a lot like Earth…if Earth was on fire. TORLEY/Flickr

Almost Earth – another step on the road to habitable worlds

Two papers were published today in Nature, each independently revealing that a planet discovered by the Kepler mission is the closest thing we’ve found yet to another Earth. But don’t pack your bags just…
Two of Kepler’s four reaction wheels have stopped working, which may mean the end for the spacecraft. NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel

The end of Kepler? That would be universally bad

As I write this, engineers at NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technologies have their fingers crossed they’ll be able to restart the stricken Kepler space observatory, which has been in hibernation mode…
Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered, but are we any closer to finding life? AAP

Exoplanets: how the search for life became sexy

In the late 1980s, when I was a young whipper-snapper just starting out as an astronomer, it was quite obvious some fields had an incredibly high profile and others were outré. The sexy ideas at the time…

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