NASA’s orbiting Kepler telescope has discovered an unlikely pair of planets orbiting a distant star. One is small and rocky, the other is large and gaseous. What makes them unusual is that both are ...

Recently, the field of astronomy has been quite lively, as new discoveries from Kepler data have directly overturned our previous understanding of planetary orbits!

In this latest data mining, scientists unexpectedly discovered two planets with extremely unusual orbits, whose trajectories differ dramatically from the known patterns of planetary orbits. In our ...

The orbits of a seven-planet system discovered in Kepler Space Telescope data has been sonified. Credit: Bishop’s University ...

SEATTLE —NASA has discovered the smallest planet ever seen beyond our solar system — a rocky world just 1.4 times larger than Earth — using its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The planet, ...

But the Kepler-9 planets have orbits that are significantly closer to their parent star than Mercury is to our own sun. Astronomers assume that the planets formed farther out, in a colder region where ...

NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

For most of his career, Geoff Marcy never thought he'd find any extrasolar planets. But that's all changed. Marcy is one of the lead astronomers sifting through the Kepler data, and has been credited ...

Kepler’s goodnight message had to be timed perfectly. On Thursday 15 November, a series of commands from a laboratory in Colorado were transmitted to Nasa’s Deep Space Network, a system of huge radio ...

NASA has discovered a new super-Earth that has a year only lasting a few hours. The exoplanet K2-141b, was found very close to its orange sun-like star, and has an orbital period of less than one ...