New Kepler Planets Confirmed!

In a major announcement this week, researchers with the Kepler Space Telescope science team have confirmed the existence of 1,284 new planets that had originally been found by Kepler.  This is a huge leap in the number of confirmed planets, bringing the total to over 2,300. The previous science data collection done by Kepler was completed in 2013, so why is this new news? Well the exciting part is that these are confirmed planets.  Usually when Kepler detects a signal indicating a potential planet, it needs to be verified by using some of the larger ground-based telescopes.  Kepler is not immune...

Navigating the Cosmic Ocean

Beyond the atmosphere, past the stars we see, farther than the Milky Way, and continuing past Andromeda, we reach the real cosmic ocean.  So called because like an ocean on Earth, it is vast, homogeneous, and impossible to navigate by common sense alone.  In the cosmic ocean, an impossibly huge amount of space separates island galaxies, whose strong gravity binds them across incredible distances, dictating their course, and forming the largest and most massive structures in the universe: galaxy clusters. Because these immense structures are so vast and so distant, it requires the work of several telescopes to map out...