April 2019
Scanning the skies for exoplanets
... at a time, each measuring 24 x 90 degrees - an area of sky that will be 400 times larger than that covered by Kepler. Like Kepler, TESS will search for exoplanets by detecting the fractional dip in a star’s brightness as an orbiting exoplanet passes...
22 July 2015
Exoplanet Kepler 452b and what the search for a real life “Another Earth” means for human self-perception
...Humanity is not very likely to get confirmation of any sort of life – intelligent or otherwise – as ever having had a presence on Kepler 452b. But what such discoveries do give us chance to reflect on how we reconcile the existence of our own species...
March 2017
Twinkle - a mission to unravel the story of planets in our galaxy
... NASA space missions such as GAIA, Cheops, PLATO, Kepler II and TESS will increase the number of known systems...surveys in our galaxy (e.g. WASP or HATNet) and space observatories (Kepler-2, GAIA, Cheops and TESS). The Twinkle satellite will be built...
September 2017
Binary stars and their extraordinary lives
...tool for measuring the masses of stars, as discovered by Kepler and Newton in the 17th century. Their orbital properties, such... to astrophysics today as they were in the 17th century to Kepler and Newton. They can be used to measure the expansion rate...
January 2018
Maximising the economic opportunities of deep space
... mining companies: Planetary Resources (PRI) and Deep Space Industries (DSI) being the most prominent. Previously, Kepler Energy and Space Engineering (KESE) announced plans for asteroid mining as well, but they appear to have...
October 2019
Are we prepared for SETI discovery?
... the assistance of non-professional citizen scientists or even machine intelligence in the search. Since the same databases (Kepler space telescope data in particular) are also used to look for promising astrobiology sites, the two scientific...
