Explore the universe and discover our home planet with the official NASA Tumblr account
ALT
Tiny BurstCube’s Tremendous Travelogue
Meet BurstCube! This shoebox-sized satellite is designed to study the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, called gamma-ray bursts. It detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.
BurstCube may be small, but it had a huge journey to get to space.
We hope you like your planetary systems extra spicy. 🔥
A new system of seven sizzling planets has been discovered using data from our retired Kepler space telescope.
Named Kepler-385, it’s part of a new catalog of planet candidates and multi-planet systems discovered using Kepler.
The discovery helps illustrate that multi-planetary systems have more circular orbits around the host star than systems with only one or two planets.
Our Kepler mission is responsible for the discovery of the most known exoplanets to date. The space telescope’s observations ended in 2018, but its data continues to paint a more detailed picture of our galaxy today.
Here are a few more things to know about Kepler-385:
On August 6, 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a blip in her radio telescope data. And then another. Eventually, Bell Burnell figured out that these blips, or pulses, were not from people or machines.