23 June 2021
Exoplanets with Earth-like biospheres may be rare
... use to convert light and carbon dioxide into oxygen and nutrients. All except one. That planet is Kepler-442b; a rocky planet about twice the mass of the Earth, orbiting a moderately hot star to receive just...
22 June 2021
The NASA Kepler Mission
... Telescope (HST), relatively few will be familiar with NASA’s Kepler mission, let alone the follow-on K2 mission performed by the...There are more planets than stars’ reports that the Kepler mission revealed “the fact that planets outnumber stars in ...
August 2018
Exoplanet census promises radical discoveries
... solar system’s planets, except for Mercury, while Kepler has primarily studied planetary systems very different from our... combination of the WFIRST exoplanet microlensing survey and Kepler’s transit survey will provide a complete statistical census...
27 July 2015
Debating Kepler 452b, Yuri Milner, and the search for intelligent life
... possibility of Earth making contact with intelligent life. A potentially “Earth-like” planet out there, which is what Kepler 452b is alleged to be, will obviously generate a more-than-usual amount of discussion on the possibility of discovering life...
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...
23 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...