Operating under this principle, Kepler looks for disruption in the light from a star which can indicate that there’s a planet in orbit around it. With careful observation it’s possible to ...

It does this by detecting slight drops in the brightness of stars, signaling the presence of one or more planets hanging out in orbit. Kepler has spotted many new worlds during its mission ...

Planets change orbit shape around Neptune’s size. Metal-rich stars help giant planets form. Eccentric orbits suggest chaotic planet formation.

Keep your eye on the ball” is a motto for many athletes—and for astronomers trying to find Earth-threatening space rocks ...

To see this, recall the definition of angular momentum: Kepler's second law states that the area swept out by the line connecting the satellite to the Earth's center over a given time Δt is a constant ...

The main reason why orbits are drawn as ellipses in textbooks is to demonstrate Kepler's second law. If the orbit of the Earth was drawn as shown in the correctly scaled diagram it would be ...

The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star.

Together with precise optical ranging between selected satellites, this provides orbit determination capabilities with unprecedented accuracy. The Kepler infrastructure thus consists of three main ...

Moreover, with truly prescient insight, Kepler suggested that the planets were kept in orbit by a force emanating from the sun itself. This radical idea was eventually demonstrated by Isaac ...

The author is an HCMC distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His life was marked by unrelenting misfortune. At the age of four, he contracted smallpox, losing most of ...

As of early 2012, Kepler has uncovered 17 stars with multiple planets as well as a new class of planets that orbit double and even triple stars. But only a handful of the exoplanets discovered so ...