The image of Luke Skywalker gazing wistfully across the desert of Tatooine while a pair of “suns” set on the horizon is among ...

Kepler was one of the most successful exoplanet-hunting missions so far. It discovered 2,600 confirmed exoplanets—almost half of the total—in its almost 10 years of operation. However ...

A selection of exoplanets that orbit in the habitable zone around their stars — where water can sit in liquid form on the surface. From left: Kepler-22b, Kepler-69c, Kepler-452b, Kepler-62f ...

The Kepler mission was conceived as a Discovery Program mission at the turn of the century and was approved as the tenth mission in the program in December 2001. At that time only 80 exoplanets ...

Using this technique, and by gathering the light curves from these stars, Kepler uncovered thousands of exoplanets. The UCLA team turned to 1,600 of these light curves to extract information about ...

Since its launch in 2009, NASA's Kepler mission has used the transit method to confirm more than 60 new exoplanets and to identify 2,300 candidate planets now awaiting confirmation via further ...

And Kepler-16 b, located roughly 250 light-years away, is the real deal. Discovered in 2011, this exoplanet defies the traditional solitary planetary orbit by circling two stars — much like the ...

The telescope used what's known as the transit method to look for exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system), launching a new era of planetary discovery. Kepler watched over 530,000 stars for ...

Most of those observations were made by the exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which for four consecutive years kept an eye on a small patch of sky containing a few hundred thousand stars.

They then compared the occurrence rates of these planets using data from NASA's TESS, or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, for the younger population and from Kepler for the older population.