NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

Superflares may be less threatening than originally thought

11 August 2021 Astronomy Now

Superflares from red dwarf stars, long thought to be a threat to orbiting exoplanets, may not be as dangerous as previously thought, researchers say.

Astronomers find possible near-Earth-like planet in archived Kepler data

9 June 2020 Astronomy Now

Researchers find evidence for an intriguing exoplanet in archived Kepler data, a “mirror-image” Earth-like world in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star.

TESS finds its first Earth-size planet and a sub-Neptune sibling

15 April 2019 Astronomy Now

NASA’s planet-hunting TESS spacecraft has found its first Earth-size planet orbiting a star 53 light years away, along with a larger sub-Neptune sibling.

Planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft out of fuel, ending mission

30 October 2018 Astronomy Now

NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has final run out of fuel, forcing its retirement after an extended 9.5-year mission that saw the discovery of 2,681 confirmed planets to date and 2,899 more candidates.

NASA’s new planet hunter starts work

30 July 2018 Stephen Clark

NASA’s newest observatory in space has started its search for planets around other stars as astronomers zero in on worlds that are ripe for research by follow-up missions like the James Webb Space Telescope.

Kepler finds nearly 80 more exoplanet candidates in recent search

25 June 2018 Astronomy Now

In a dress-rehearsal of sorts for NASA’s next planet-hunting satellite, researchers sifting through recent observations by NASA’s ageing Kepler space telescope have identified nearly 80 new candidate exoplanets.

NASA’s Kepler mission announces largest collection of exoplanets ever discovered

10 May 2016 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets — the single largest finding of planets to date. Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date, more than 3,200 now have been verified, and 2,325 of these were discovered by the space telescope. Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets.

Planet with most eccentric orbit flashes astronomers with reflected light

19 March 2016 Astronomy Now

A team of researchers led by San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane were able to detect a signal of reflected light from a planet known as HD 20782 b — a “flash” of starlight bouncing off the planet’s atmosphere as it made its closest orbital approach to its parent star on the most eccentric, comet-like orbit yet seen.

Finding new worlds with a play of light and shadow

1 November 2015 Astronomy Now

One method to discover planets beyond the solar system by far is transit photometry, which measures changes in a star’s brightness when a planet crosses in front of its star along our line of sight. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has used this technique to become the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than a thousand established discoveries. Satellites carrying improved technology for all-sky surveys are now planned, missions that will tell us a great deal about alien planetary systems similar to our own.