It stares at a fixed patch of sky, watching a field of more than 150, 000 stars for the tiny dips in starlight that occur if an orbiting planet passes between a star and the telescope.
BBC: Exoplanets near red dwarfs suggest another Earth nearer
The probe was built with four reaction wheels and needs three of them -- one for each axis -- to aim its telescope precisely at a distant star, deputy project manager Charlie Sobeck said.
The telescope was pointed at a young star, HD 100546, about 2.5-times the size of our sun.
The telescope was pointed at a young star, HD 100546, which is about 2.5-times the size our sun.
Since 2009, the billion-euro Herschel telescope has been unravelling the complexities of star birth and galaxy evolution.
Astronomers using the Kepler telescope found the first known double-star planet just last September Kepler-16, a gassy oddball orb the size of Saturn that circles a pair of stars 200 light-years from Earth, like the planet Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films.
Astronomers using the Kepler telescope found the first known double-star planet just last September Kepler-16b, a gassy oddball orb the size of Saturn that circles a pair of stars 200 light-years from Earth, like the planet Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films.
Two telescopes positioned 100 metres apart, for example, can then be used to measure the position of a star with the same accuracy as a single 100-metre telescope.
Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii discovered the four star pairs, each of which is a binary system in which two stars circle each other in less than four hours.
MSN: 'Impossible' stars found in our galaxy - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
Scientists made the discovery first by pinpointing their target through infrared images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and later using the Very Large Telescope to deduce that the object was both too small to be a star as well as hot and young enough (752F and under 120 million years old) to fit the behavior of a planet orphaned early into its existence.
On 3 November, NASA and the European Space Agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had captured the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star.
Now, an international team of astronomers has trained the Fermi space-based gamma ray telescope on V407 Cygni, a "binary" system comprising a white dwarf star and a red giant companion, 9, 000 light-years away.
Earlier this month, astronomers using the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network announced the discovery of four more massive worlds, each one orbiting a separate star.
Earlier this month, astronomers using the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network announced the discovery of four more massive alien worlds, each one orbiting a separate star.
应用推荐