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Kepler Full Focal Plane Image - Inverted

Kepler Full Focal Plane Image - Inverted

Inverted image (dark stars on light sky) Stars in the image are all brighter than magnitude 18.5. Stars brighter than 11.5 are "saturated" (all look the same brightness in the image).

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NASA/Kepler mission

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This graph shows the brightness variations of the brown dwarf named 2MASSJ22282889-431026 measured simultaneously by both NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
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Probing Brown Dwarf Layers
Probing Brown Dwarf Layers
NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.
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Kepler Mission Discovers Its First Rocky Planet
Kepler Mission Discovers Its First Rocky Planet
This artist's concept depicts giant planets circling between belts of dust. Scientists think the star system HD 95086 may have a planetary architecture similar to this.
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Hidden in a Dust Halo
Hidden in a Dust Halo
Animation of a frozen planet, similar to worlds in our own solar system's Kuiper Belt.
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Kuiper Belt World
Kuiper Belt World
This artist's concept depicts in the foreground planet Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of its star, which is seen peeking out from behind the right edge of the planet.
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Morning Star (Artist Concept)
Morning Star (Artist Concept)
Astronomers have discovered one of the most distant planets known, a gas giant about 13,000 light-years from Earth, called OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L. The planet was discovered using a technique called mi...
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Map of Exoplanets Found in our Galaxy (Artist's Concept)
Map of Exoplanets Found in our Galaxy (Artist's Concept)
This size and scale of the Kepler-452 system compared alongside the Kepler-186 system and the solar system.
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Kepler-452 and the Solar System
Kepler-452 and the Solar System
Astronomers were surprised to see these data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in January 2013, showing a huge eruption of dust around a star called NGC 2547-ID8. In this plot, infrared brightnes...
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Witnessing a Planetary Wreckage
Witnessing a Planetary Wreckage
Of the more than 1,000 verified planets found by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, eight are less than twice Earth-size and in their stars' habitable zone. All eight orbit stars cooler and smaller tha...
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NASA Kepler's Hall of Fame: Small Habitable Zone Exoplanets
NASA Kepler's Hall of Fame: Small Habitable Zone Exoplanets
Exoplanets can be pretty weird places, but do their names have to be so weird, too? Watch and learn how the scientific community determines and categorizes these unique planets.
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Q&Alien- What's in an exoplanet name?
Q&Alien- What's in an exoplanet name?
For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent st...
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Exo-eclipse in x-ray vision - illustration only
Exo-eclipse in x-ray vision - illustration only
A unique feature of the seventh Kepler candidate catalog is that it is the first to fully automate the assessment of transit-like signals. The total height of each bar shows the total number of Kep...
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Assessment of Kepler Dataset
Assessment of Kepler Dataset
This artist's concept shows a Jupiter-like planet, called Upsilon Andromedae b, soaking up the scorching rays of its nearby star. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope determined that this planet is two-f...
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Exotic World Blisters Under the Sun
Exotic World Blisters Under the Sun
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found that the hottest part of a distant planet, named upsilon Andromedae b, is not under the glare of its host star as might be expected.
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Planetary Hot Spot Not Under the Glare of Star
Planetary Hot Spot Not Under the Glare of Star
Orbiting planets cause stars to wobble in space, changing the color of the light astronomers observe.
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Radial Velocity videos
Radial Velocity
Astronomers can detect the presence of disks of dust orbiting distant stars by measuring how the combined light from the star and disk changes across different wavelengths.
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The Invisible Disk
The Invisible Disk
What does an extremely young planetary system look like? The answer depends on your point of view. This diagram shows how such a system appears when viewed from different directions.
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Observing Young Stars: Hitting the 'Sweet Spot'
Observing Young Stars: Hitting the 'Sweet Spot'
Large gas-giant planets like Jupiter may be more rare in the galaxy than small, rocky worlds like Earth.
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Where are the Giants?
Where are the Giants?
This is an artist's concept of the star HD 3651 as it is orbited by a close-in Saturn-mass planetary companion and the distant brown dwarf companion discovered by Spitzer infrared photographs.
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Brown Dwarf Companion
Brown Dwarf Companion
Do other planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, also host life forms?
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In the Zone: How Scientists Search for Habitable Planets
In the Zone: How Scientists Search for Habitable Planets
In the depths of the universe, the cores of two collapsed stars violently merge to release a burst of the deadliest and most powerful form of light, known as gamma rays.
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Two astronauts are standing on an asteroid, watching a pair of neutron stars, or the cores of collapsed stars, collide in the distance. The result of the collision is bright, concentrated beams of light called gamma rays. The gamma ray bursts narrowly miss the astronauts as they shoot outward from the collision.
Gamma Ray Ghouls
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Tres-2 - in Kepler Photometer First Light Image
Tres-2 - in Kepler Photometer First Light Image
This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-47, the first transiting circumbinary system -- multiple planets orbiting two suns – 4,900 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus.
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Sharing the Light of Two Suns
Sharing the Light of Two Suns
In this artist's impression, a disk of dusty material leftover from star formation girds two young stars like a hula hoop. As the two stars whirl around each other, they periodically peek out from ...
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Dusty Hula Hoop Rings 'Blinking' Stellar Duo
Dusty Hula Hoop Rings 'Blinking' Stellar Duo
Celebrate your rocking single status with a rogue planet, the world without a star.
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Illustration of a rogue planet.
Rogue planet Valentine

Explore Alien Worlds

Exoplanet Travel Bureau

This set of travel posters envision a day when the creativity of scientists and engineers will allow us to do things we can only dream of now.
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Strange New Worlds

Explore an interactive gallery of some of the most intriguing and exotic planets discovered so far.
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A planetary tour through time. The ancients debated the existence of planets beyond our own; now we know of thousands.

Historic Timeline

A planetary tour through time. The ancients debated the existence of planets beyond our own; now we know of thousands.
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