The Kepler Space Telescope will soon run out of fuel and end its mission. Here are nine fundamental discoveries about planets aided by Kepler in the 9 years since its launch.
telescopes
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Seeing Green: A Stratospheric View of the 2017 Total Eclipse
Airborne telescopes gave scientists a sky-high view of the 2017 Great American Eclipse as they took measurements that are difficult to obtain from the ground.
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Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope Launches
Scanning for traces of faraway worlds, TESS will make observations over an area hundreds of times larger than that observed by its predecessor, the Kepler Space Telescope.
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Looking to the Future of Exoplanet Science
Upcoming missions seeking to unravel the secrets of exoplanets abound. An informal survey of astronomers revealed which of those projects they most eagerly await.
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Observing Mercury’s Brilliant Flares from Earth
Researchers make the first short-term observation of sodium flares in Mercury’s exosphere.
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Ten Earth-Sized Planets Found by Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope
A new analysis of exoplanet candidates also reveals a previously unrecognized tendency for smaller exoplanets to grow into two distinct sizes.
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Seven Earth-Sized Planets Seen Whizzing Around One Cool Star
Although all the exoplanets orbit closer than Mercury does to our Sun, liquid water may persist on some of them because their star radiates so little heat.
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Final Mirror Segment Added to Powerful Future Space Observatory
After years of planning, testing, and assembly, the James Webb Space Telescope, the world's largest infrared, space-based observatory, is taking shape.
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Jupiter's Europa Helps Earthlings See Sister Moon's Volcano
By briefly slipping between Earth and sister Jovian moon Io, Europa fortuitously enabled an Earth-based telescope to observe, with greater detail than ever before, a huge, puzzling volcano on Io.
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Scientists Find "Close Cousin" of Earth
The Kepler space telescope spots a planet in a solar system 1400 light years away that closely resembles Earth in its size, distance from its star, and the type of star it orbits.