May 2022
Essential guide to the James Webb Space Telescope
... protective atmosphere. Over 10 percent of the General Observer Programme is dedicated to studying the COSMOS field, a small patch of sky in the constellation Sextans used for studying galaxy evolution. Here, astronomers hope to detect the light from...
25 April 2018
New Gaia data reveals details on over 1.6 billion stars
... impressive feat of data collection by sweeping across the sky while taking observations in a large circular motion. “In...minute, Gaia measures about a hundred thousand stars on the sky,” said Anthony Brown, Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium...
September 2017
Science searches for cosmic company
... these instruments on existing radio telescopes. The search strategy was two-pronged: to scan the entire visible sky at relatively low sensitivity, and to zero in for a more intensive examination of approximately 1,000 nearby star systems. Although...
14 September 2016
Gaia's first map hints at big things to come
..., it has already pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1142 million stars. “Today’s release gives...“Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before.” The precision...
15 April 2018
TESS, NASA's planet-finding mission launches today!
...orbit (HEO) is TESS, the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey whose primary mission is to search for planets ...115 square degrees, or around 0.25 percent of the sky, TESS will look at the whole sky all at once. To compare, it would take around...
20 September 2018
TESS finds its first exoplanet – a super-Earth 60 light years away
... seen with the naked eye in exceptionally dark, clear skies. Pi Mensae was one of several hundred thousand pre-...dozen constellations from Capricornus to Pictor. This swath of the sky’s southern hemisphere includes more than a dozen stars (aside from...
