19 February 2018
TESS arrives in Florida ahead of its April launch
...Orbit (HEO) will allow for an unobstructed view of continuous light curves – the dip in brightness from the star being observed –... and the size of a planet is proportional to the amount of light it blocks from its host star as it makes a transit. The...
October 2015
Finding Earth-like worlds: the tale of how Kepler-452b was discovered
... is higher than we expected it to be? We’ve worked very hard and have made a lot of headway in reducing instrument noise in our light curves. We have more sensitivity than we did two years ago. And significantly more sensitivity than we did even...
03 February 2020
Researchers discover "invisible" stars too dim to be seen
... practically invisible red dwarfs were the cause of the dimming and brightening. “The very densely sampled light curve was obtained solely thanks to an early alert from Gaia ,” say the international team in their research paper...
04 October 2018
Astronomers find compelling evidence for first confirmed exomoon
... behind the changes. “We saw little deviations and wobbles in the light curve that caught our attention,” said Kipping. “It was definitely a shocking moment to see that light curve — my heart started beating a little faster and I just kept looking...
30 November 2015
“Alien Megastructure” Star's Dimming was Possibly Caused by Comets
... the telescope. "The lack of strong infrared excess 2 years after the events responsible for the unusual light curve observed by Kepler further disfavors the scenarios involving a catastrophic collision in a KIC 8462852 asteroid belt, a giant impact...
14 November 2016
Mysterious Quark Nova lights up an exploding star for a second time
... QN-shocked envelope. The team also suggest that the models they produced to explain why this double light-curve was observed for ASASSN-15lh can be applied “to any progenitor star (O-stars, luminous blue variables, Wolf...
