A meter-class telescope with a coronagraph to block solar light, placed in the strong interference region of the solar gravitational lens (SGL), is capable of imaging an exoplanet at a distance of up to 30 parsecs with a few 10 km-scale resolution on its surface. The picture shows results of a simulation of the effects …
There may be as many as one Earth-like planet for every five Sun-like stars in the Milky way Galaxy, according to new estimates by University of British Columbia astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission. To be considered Earth-like, a planet must be rocky, roughly Earth-sized and orbiting Sun-like (G-type) stars. It also has to …
The cumulative number of exoplanets that have been discovered has been following power law scaling for the past 25 years and if this continued to 2050 then we would find about 100 million exoplanets. 20,000 exoplanets should be found from the past primary Kepler mission and the completed K2 mission and from the Transiting Exoplanet …
About 35% of all known exoplanets which are bigger than Earth should be water-rich. These water worlds likely formed in similar ways to the giant planet cores Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune in our own solar system. The newly-launched TESS mission will find many more of them, with the help of ground-based spectroscopic follow-up. The next …
An international team of astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler and the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space telescopes, as well as ground-based telescopes have confirmed 44 exoplanets. New techniques developed to validate the find could hugely accelerate the confirmation of more extrasolar planet candidates. John Livingston, lead author of the study and a graduate …
NASA and SpaceX are targeting the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for no earlier than 6:51 p.m. EDT. Frequent updates from the countdown will begin here at 6:30 p.m. You can also watch at http://www.nasa.gov/live. …
NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is scheduled to launch as early as April 16, 2018. TESS is expected to find thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighborhood. Powerful telescopes like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can …
When a star has a solar the light will bounce off of any exoplanets. This could then be detected by fast sensor telescopes. Any fluctuation in the star and not just solar flares can be used in this method. A NASA NIAC will use interstellar LIDAR to detect exoplanets. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist …
The high-profile quest to spot moons orbiting distant planets has been a series of let-downs, with each hint of an ‘exomoon’ fading under closer inspection. So astronomer David Kipping, at Columbia University in New York City, didn’t want to reveal his team’s detection of another possible exomoon, until they could confirm it using the Hubble …
Nearly 3,500 exoplanets have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led study, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes. The team used …
Currently there are 3486 confirmed exoplanets (mainly from the Kepler Space telescope survey) and there are 4496 exoplanet candidates and 581 multiplanet systems. We are within about 11 months of the launch of the TESS space telescope. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in …