NASA’s Kepler mission discovers ‘super-Earth’ i. NASA’s - TopicsExpress



          

NASA’s Kepler mission discovers ‘super-Earth’ i. NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, which is carrying out a new mission has made its first exoplanet discovery — a ‘super-Earth’ located 180 light-years from Earth. ii. This led to the discovery of a planet, HIP 116454b, which is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star that is smaller and cooler than our Sun, making the planet too hot for life as we know it. iii. The discovery was confirmed with measurements taken by the HARPS-North spectrograph of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, which captured the wobble of the star caused by the planet’s gravitational tug as it orbits.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:46:18 +0000

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