It is always fascinating when science fiction becomes reality. This is the case with the Kepler-16b, a binary system that proved to host a cold giant planet (like Saturn), which compiles from gas and rocks. This opens a wide new category of planetary systems since most of the stars belong …
An amazing picture was published at the APOD today ! It shows all 1235 candidate planets discovered by Kepler in the same relative scale along with the Sun (top right … the lonely star) with the silhouettes of Earth and Jupiter. Somebody has to search deep in the high resolution …
Kepler is a space based telescope to study a small area between Cygnus and Lyra for exoplanet transits of all possible targets but mainly to find Earth sized candidates in the habitable zone. A fist publication reveals these numbers: “On 1 February 2011 the Kepler Mission released data for 156,453 …