Announcements

Kepler Discovers its Smallest Habitable Zone Planets

Project News • April 18th, 2013

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

Gravity-Bending Find Leads to Kepler Meeting Einstein

Project News • April 4th, 2013

NASA's Kepler space telescope has witnessed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star. The findings are among the first detections of this phenomenon -- a result of Einstein's theory of general relativity -- in binary, or double, star systems.

NASA Survey Counts Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

Project News • May 16th, 2012

Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. The results reveal new information about their total numbers, origins and the possible dangers they may pose.

NASA's WISE Catches Aging Star Erupting With Dust

Project News • April 26th, 2012

Images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star in the throes of a fiery outburst, spraying the cosmos with dust. The findings offer a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets...

WISE All-Sky Image Now Available on "Science on a Sphere"

Project News • April 9th, 2012

The WISE all-sky image is now available for projection on "Science on a Sphere" (see http://sos.noaa.gov/ for info). Science On a Sphere is a large visualization system that uses computers and video projectors to display animated data onto the outside of a sphere. Said another way, SOS is an...

NASA Releases New WISE Mission Catalog of Entire Infrared Sky

Project News • March 14th, 2012

NASA unveiled a new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky today showing more than a half billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

NASA's Kepler Announces 11 Planetary Systems Hosting 26 Planets

Project News • January 26th, 2012

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star. Such systems will help...

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

Project News • January 11th, 2012

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars.

NASA Discovers First Earth-size Planets Beyond Our Solar System

Project News • December 20th, 2011

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system.

Kepler-22b, Super-Earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star

Project News • December 5th, 2011

The Kepler team has discovered Kepler-22b, a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth that orbits a sun-like star in 289 days. It the smallest planet yet found to orbit in the middle of its star's habitable zone, which is the region around a star where temperatures are just right for liquid water, a...