Tag: NASA

NASA Finds 1200 New Exoplanets

 

While NASA continues to search for more rocky planets outside of the solar system, they’re also still searching for Earth-like planets here in our own backyard.  For example, Cygnus is one of our closest neighbors, from a galactic sense, and NASA has deployed the Kepler Space Telescope to study the Milky Way galaxy. As it turns out, the Kepler Space Telescope is pretty good; NASA has discovered 1200 rocky exoplanets in the constellation Cygnus, including 58 planets with Earth-like life-friendly orbits.

There’s only one problem:  now you have to tell which exoplanets are simply rocks and which are actual planets.

 

Kepler basically measures how many objects of a certain size cross in front of the face of the star.  Given Kepler has an accuracy rating of nearly 80 percent according to CalTech, it’s likely that most of these discoveries are actually planets, which means that Earth-like planet systems may be pretty common.

You can read more about the new discovery on CNN.com or click on the link below:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/02/02/nasa.kepler.planets/index.html?hpt=T2

Hubble Telescope Finds Most Distant Galaxy Visible From Earth

 

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what astronomers are claiming is the oldest galaxy in the universe. Here’s some of what NASA’s Hubble website says about the discovery

“The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object’s color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away.

The dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang, only four percent of the universe’s current age. It is tiny and considered a building block of today’s giant galaxies. Over one hundred such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way galaxy.”

 

Think of that – the light from this object we’re seeing now took 13.2 billion years to reach our eyes. That’s mind-boggling. We’re actually looking back in time. Anyway, the study which appears in the journal Nature, was led by Rychard Bouwens at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The tiny smudge of light will be further studied and confirmed when the infrared-optimized James Webb Space Telescope is up and running in 2014.

You can learn more about this story by clicking the link below:

http://www.space.com/10691-oldest-galaxy-discovered-hubble-space-telescope.html