It launched a cosmic wave of pop culture that eventually brought us TV families on distant planets.
Distant planets have long orbits and therefore long wavelengths, and you cannot do the analysis properly until you have seen at least one orbit.
She said ground-based experiments and space missions planned in the next few years would give more detailed information on distant planets like those announced by the Kepler team.
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While this is similar to how distant planets are discovered already, much like satellite telescopes, the vantage point of space will deliver much clearer and more detailed information.
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Covering around half of the universe's light spectrum, between infrared and radio waves, the new telescope should be able to detect distant planets, black holes and other intergalactic notables.
So if life can thrive in the dark, in isolation, in temperatures no warmer than -13C, where else could it be on Earth and beyond, on distant planets or moons for example?
If the question is life - and that's one of the most profound questions we can ask, he says - the answer is almost certainly not Mars or an asteroid, but rather the icy moons orbiting distant planets like Saturn and Jupiter.
Kepler is designed to find out how common habitable planets are, but its target stars are too distant for their planets to be studied directly.
The question now is not are there planets orbiting distant stars, or even how many, but what do these planets look like and, crucially, could any support life?
This is easily enough to detect Jupiter-like planets around distant stars, and it should also be enough to detect smaller, Uranus-like planets around stars within the sun's stellar neighbourhood.
This would make sense if short-period comets started off in the Kuiper belt and were nudged into closer orbits around the sun by the gravity of the most distant of the giant planets, Neptune.
Since the material reflects hundreds of times less light than the paints currently used, the agency said it could help create equipment capable of measuring distant objects such as planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.
The kilometre-wide separation of the component satellites of Terrestrial Planet Finder should allow it to see planets in distant solar systems a problem akin to looking for moths flying around a football-stadium arc light that is several hundred kilometres away.
With the suitably mysterious name of "Project 1640, " the new instrument is the first of its kind that's able to directly spot planets orbiting distant suns -- as opposed to existing systems that use indirect detection methods to determine the orbit of exoplanets.
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I'm a science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System" who writes about over-the-horizon technology, primarily astronomy and space science.
I'm a science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System" who writes about over-the-horizon technology, primarily in the realms of astronomy and space science.
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They have used similar observations of more distant stars to find "exoplanets" (planets orbiting stars other than the sun) and in a few rare cases, to measure characteristics of the exoplanet atmospheres.
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