Thursday 25 December 2014

NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Finds New Exoplanet


NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft NASA's planet-hunting Kepler finds new exoplanet has made a comeback with the discovery of the first exoplanet found using its new K2 mission. The new exoplanet called HIP 116454b is 2.5 times the diameter of the Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star. HIP 116454b and its star are 180 light-years away from the Earth, toward the constellation Pisces, the US space agency said in a statement. The discovery was made when astronomers and engineers devised an ingenious way to re-purpose Kepler for the K2 mission and continue its search of the cosmos for other worlds. "Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not even part of the conversation," said Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC. The discovery was confirmed with measurements taken by the HARPS-North spectrograph of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you youngindiatimes .please keep on updating........... thumps up

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