9/10/2023 0 Comments Kepler telescope nasa![]() ![]() In addition, Kepler has been a boon to astronomers studying variations in stars due to starspots and other stellar “weather”, since these phenomena also result in fluctuations in a star’s light measurable by the photometer. For sufficiently large planets, those with small orbits, or both, the light blockage is large enough to be detected.Īstronomers identified over 2000 exoplanets using data from the Kepler mission, with more than 2000 possible planets that require follow-up confirmation as of 2018. If and when an exoplanet “transits” or crosses in front of its host star, it blocks some of the star’s light. The telescope carries only one scientific instrument: a “photometer”, which simply measures the amount of light coming from those stars. This patch of the sky is 115 square degrees, or roughly 575 times the apparent size of the full Moon on the sky. The Kepler space telescope’s original mission was to observe one patch of the sky containing roughly 150,000 main sequence stars - stars like the Sun in the prime of their life. Astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian were responsible for the preparation of the catalog for potentially interesting stars, and have participated extensively in follow-up observations of Kepler planetary discoveries. ![]() ![]() The mission finally ended in 2018, though the data it produced continues to provide astronomers with valuable information about planets in our galactic neighborhood. After the spacecraft’s pointing control failed, the mission was renamed K2, and it continued to hunt for exoplanets as it tumbled slowly, with its field of view drifting slowly across the sky. Until it lost its ability to point, Kepler observed a region of the sky containing about 150,000 stars with potential planets, monitoring them for the slight decrease in light caused by planets crossing in front of the star. Most of those identifications have come thanks to one observatory: NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Since the early 1990s, astronomers have identified thousands of planets orbiting other stars. ![]()
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