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June 19, 2017: Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope is our first mission capable of identifying Earth-size planets around other stars. On Monday, June 19, 2017, scientists announced the results from the final Kepler candidate catalog of the mission at a press conference at NASA's Ames Research Center.
To learn more about NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, visit www.nasa.gov/kepler.
NASA's Ames Research Center is located in California's Silicon Valley.
June 19, 2017: NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of a rocky planet.
This is the most comprehensive and detailed catalog release of candidate exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, from Kepler’s first four years of data. It’s also the final catalog from the spacecraft’s view of the patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation.
With the release of this catalog, derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, there are now 4,034 planet candidates identified by Kepler. Of which, 2,335 have been verified as exoplanets. Of roughly 50 near-Earth size habitable zone candidates detected by Kepler, more than 30 have been verified.
Additionally, results using Kepler data suggest two distinct size groupings of small planets. Both results have significant implications for the search for life. The final Kepler catalog will serve as the foundation for more study to determine the prevalence and demographics of planets in the galaxy, while the discovery of the two distinct planetary populations shows that about half the planets we know of in the galaxy either have no surface, or lie beneath a deep, crushing atmosphere—an environment unlikely to host life.
The findings were presented at a news conference Monday at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.
“The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near Earth-analogs—planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Understanding their frequency in the galaxy will help inform the design of future NASA missions to directly image another Earth.”
The Kepler space telescope hunts for planets by detecting the minuscule drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
This is the eighth release of the Kepler candidate catalog, gathered by reprocessing the entire set of data from Kepler’s observations during the first four years of its primary mission. This data will enable scientists to determine what planetary populations—from rocky bodies the size of Earth, to gas giants the size of Jupiter—make up the galaxy’s planetary demographics.
To ensure a lot of planets weren't missed, the team introduced their own simulated planet transit signals into the data set and determined how many were correctly identified as planets. Then, they added data that appear to come from a planet, but were actually false signals, and checked how often the analysis mistook these for planet candidates. This work told them which types of planets were overcounted and which were undercounted by the Kepler team’s data processing methods.
“This carefully-measured catalog is the foundation for directly answering one of astronomy’s most compelling questions—how many planets like our Earth are in the galaxy?” said Susan Thompson, Kepler research scientist for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and lead author of the catalog study.
One research group took advantage of the Kepler data to make precise measurements of thousands of planets, revealing two distinct groups of small planets. The team found a clean division in the sizes of rocky, Earth-size planets and gaseous planets smaller than Neptune. Few planets were found between those groupings.
Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the group measured the sizes of 1,300 stars in the Kepler field of view to determine the radii of 2,000 Kepler planets with exquisite precision.
“We like to think of this study as classifying planets in the same way that biologists identify new species of animals,” said Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and lead author of the second study. “Finding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree.”
It seems that nature commonly makes rocky planets up to about 75 percent bigger than Earth. For reasons scientists don't yet understand, about half of those planets take on a small amount of hydrogen and helium that dramatically swells their size, allowing them to "jump the gap" and join the population closer to Neptune’s size.
The Kepler spacecraft continues to make observations in new patches of sky in its extended mission, searching for planets and studying a variety of interesting astronomical objects, from distant star clusters to objects such as the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven Earth-size planets, closer to home.
Ames manages the Kepler missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
This compilation shows a few of the many highlights in an enormous three gigapixel image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) that includes the faint, glowing cloud of gas called Sharpless 2-54, the iconic Eagle Nebula and the Omega Nebula.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO) Release Date: June 14, 2017
June 14 , 2017: Two of the sky’s more famous residents share the stage with a lesser-known neighbor in this enormous new three gigapixel image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST). On the right lies the faint, glowing cloud of gas called Sharpless 2-54, the iconic Eagle Nebula is in the centre, and the Omega Nebula to the left. This cosmic trio makes up just a portion of a vast complex of gas and dust within which new stars are springing to life and illuminating their surroundings.
Sharpless 2-54 and the Eagle and Omega Nebulae are located roughly 7000 light-years away—the first two fall within the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent), while the latter lies within Sagittarius (The Archer). This region of the Milky Way houses a huge cloud of star-making material. The three nebulae indicate where regions of this cloud have clumped together and collapsed to form new stars; the energetic light from these stellar newborns has caused ambient gas to emit light of its own, which takes on the pinkish hue characteristic of areas rich in hydrogen.
Two of the objects in this image were discovered in a similar way. Astronomers first spotted bright star clusters in both Sharpless 2-54 and the Eagle Nebula, later identifying the vast, comparatively faint gas clouds swaddling the clusters. In the case of Sharpless 2-54, British astronomer William Herschel initially noticed its beaming star cluster in 1784. That cluster, catalogued as NGC 6604, appears in this image on the object’s left side. The associated very dim gas cloud remained unknown until the 1950s, when American astronomer Stewart Sharpless spotted it on photographs from the National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
The Eagle Nebula did not have to wait so long for its full glory to be appreciated. Swiss astronomer Philippe Loys de Chéseaux first discovered its bright star cluster, NGC 6611, in 1745 or 1746. A couple of decades later, French astronomer Charles Messier observed this patch of sky and also documented the nebulosity present there, recording the object as Messier 16 in his influential catalogue.
As for the Omega Nebula, de Chéseaux did manage to observe its more prominent glow and duly noted it as a nebula in 1745. However, because the Swiss astronomer’s catalogue never achieved wider renown, Messier’s re-discovery of the Omega Nebula in 1764 led to its becoming Messier 17, the seventeenth object in the Frenchman’s popular compendium.
The observations from which this image was created were taken with ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST), located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The huge final colour image was created by mosaicing dozens of pictures—each of 256 megapixels—from the telescope’s large-format OmegaCAM camera. The final result, which needed lengthy processing, totals 3.3 gigapixels, one of the largest images ever released by ESO.
More information ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious program focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.
Hubble's variable nebula is named (like the Hubble telescope itself) after the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who carried out some of the early studies of this object. It is a fan-shaped cloud of gas and dust which is illuminated by R Monocerotis (R Mon), the bright star at the bottom end of the nebula. Dense condensations of dust near the star cast shadows out into the nebula, and as they move the illumination changes, giving rise to the variations first noted by Hubble. The star itself, lying about 2,500 light-years from Earth, cannot be seen directly, but only through light scattered off of dust particles in the surrounding nebula. R Mon is believed to have a mass of about 10 times that of the Sun, and to have an age of only 300,000 years. There is probably a symmetrical counterpart of the fan-shaped nebula on the southern side of the star, but it is heavily obscured from view by dust lying between this lobe and our line of sight.
Judy: "This object lies along the Milky Way's dusty plane in the constellation Monoceros. One of my favorite things about this kind of nebula is that it reminds us that there can be a lot unseen in space. An optical illusion is produced by human intuition: it may look to you as though this is a bright cloud against a dark surface. In reality, this is a small hole in a largely unseen cloud which allows for light from a newly forming star to shine through."
"The variation in the nebula is most likely caused by shadows being cast by blobs of dust accreting near the young star. Note that the accretion process and the star itself are impossible to see in this image, and they occur at a scale too small and too distant for Hubble to see in any detail. The presence of the dusty knots and their close proximity to the star can be inferred by the shadows they cast and how fast they move across the nebula. Because the nebula is around a light year in size, the shadows appear to flow outward, which demonstrates to us the speed of light (or the speed of darkness?) in a way that I find profoundly beautiful. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the telescope could observe this object many more times so we could watch the light flow lazily through the Universe?"
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) Processing: Judy Schmidt Judy's website: http://geckzilla.com Release Date: June 13, 2017
Technical details: Data collected for Proposal 5574 made this image possible. WF/PC2 Cycle 4: Polarization Proposal
The Elephant's Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. (Source: Wikipedia)
Credit: Raul Villaverde Release Date: June 13, 2017
June 14, 2017: NASA astronaut Jack Fischer took this photograph of an American flag in one of the windows of the International Space Station's cupola, a dome-shaped module through which operations on the outside of the station can be observed and guided.
Throughout NASA's history, spacecraft and launch vehicles have always been decorated with flags. When Ed White became the first American astronaut to perform a spacewalk on June 3, 1965, his spacesuit was one of the first to be adorned with a flag patch. White's crewmate Jim McDivitt also wore a flag on his suit. The astronauts purchased the flags themselves, but following their flight, NASA made the flag patch a regular feature on the spacesuits. NASA astronauts still wear them today.
In the United States, Flag Day is celebrated on June 14. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States, which happened on June 14, 1777, by resolution of the Second Continental Congress. The United States Army also celebrates the U.S. Army Birthdays on this date; Congress adopted "the American continental army" after reaching a consensus position in the Committee of the Whole on June 14, 1775.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that officially established June 14 as Flag Day; in August 1949, National Flag Day was established by an Act of Congress. Flag Day is not an official federal holiday. (Source: Wikipedia)
June 14, 2017: The unpiloted Russian ISS Progress 67 cargo ship launched atop a Soyuz booster June 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a two-day journey to the International Space Station. The new Progress, which is carrying three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the residents of the orbital complex, is scheduled to automatically dock to the rear port of the station’s Zvezda Service Module on June 16. It will remain attached to the station through December. Credit: Roscosmos (Роскосмос) Release Date: June 14, 2017
June 14, 2017: The unpiloted Russian ISS Progress 67 cargo ship launched atop a Soyuz booster June 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a two-day journey to the International Space Station. The new Progress, which is carrying three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the residents of the orbital complex, is scheduled to automatically dock to the rear port of the station’s Zvezda Service Module on June 16. It will remain attached to the station through December.
Credit: Roscosmos (Роскосмос) Release Date: June 14, 2017
British ESA astronaut Tim Peake on ‘Extravehicular activity’, or EVA, training with German ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, United States.
Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja Image Date: April 28, 2017
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Image from orbit of Black Sea with phytoplankton swirls June 12, 2017: Most summers, jewel-toned hues appear in the Black Sea. The turquoise swirls are not the brushstrokes of a painting; they indicate the presence of phytoplankton, which trace the flow of water currents and eddies.
On May 29, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the data for this image of an ongoing phytoplankton bloom in the Black Sea. The image is a mosaic, composed from multiple satellite passes over the region.
Phytoplankton are floating, microscopic organisms that make their own food from sunlight and dissolved nutrients. Here, ample water flow from rivers like the Danube and Dnieper carries nutrients to the Black Sea. In general, phytoplankton support fish, shellfish, and other marine organisms. But large, frequent blooms can lead to eutrophication—the loss of oxygen from the water—and end up suffocating marine life.
One type of phytoplankton commonly found in the Black Sea are coccolithophores—microscopic plankton that are plated with white calcium carbonate. When aggregated in large numbers, these reflective plates are easily visible from space as bright, milky water.
“The May ramp-up in reflectivity in the Black Sea, with peak brightness in June, seems consistent with results from other years,” said Norman Kuring, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Although Kuring does not study this region, the bloom this year is one of the brightest to catch his eye since 2012.
Other types of phytoplankton can look much different in satellite imagery. “It’s important to remember that not all phytoplankton blooms make the water brighter,” Kuring said. “Diatoms, which also bloom in the Black Sea, tend to darken water more than they brighten it.”
Image Credit: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response Caption Credit: Kathryn Hansen and Pola Lem
ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of France: "I took the Paris Agreement to the International Space Station: Seen from space, climate change is very real. Some could probably use the view" #MakeOurPlanetGreatAgain
June 6, 2017: The rhythms of sea ice play a central role in many communities along Hudson Bay, the shallow inland sea in northern Canada. This is particularly true for Sanikiluaq, an Inuit town on one of the Belcher Islands in the southeastern part of the Bay.
Every year, the Belcher Islands cycle through periods dominated by ice and then by open water. Thick layers of sea ice enclose the islands during the winter. As longer and warmer days arrive in May and June, ice begins to thaw and break up. By July, the islands are usually ice free.
On May 28, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the Belcher Islands. Landfast ice (anchored to the shore) still filled many of the inlets, but areas of open water called polynyas had emerged around the island group. Beyond the polynyas, pack ice still filled much of Hudson Bay.
The cool climate makes large-scale farming impossible on the Belcher Islands. Instead, hunting and fishing are central to the town’s economy. The many inlets of the islands make good habitat and nesting grounds for ducks, whales, walruses, seals, and fish. As a result, Inuit hunters have become expert at tracking migratory animal communities on foot, boat, and snowmobile. In some cases, this involves taking advantage of currents and floes of floating ice to reach areas where wildlife congregates.
As climate changes and the behavior of sea ice has become less predictable, this task has become more complex and dangerous. That is an insight shared by veteran hunters who described their observations for the Sanikiluaq Sea Ice Project. The interviews were part of a broader effort supported by the National Science Foundation that facilitates the collection, preservation, and exchange of information about environmental change as observed by indigenous communities in the Arctic. The researchers have posted interviews and labeled MODIS-based maps on a web site that detail the observations of changing ice conditions.
As we have previously reported, the timing of sea ice breakup in some parts of Hudson Bay has changed, with melting occurring a few weeks earlier in the spring. Some researchers project that future warming in this region could reduce the duration of ice-covered conditions by seven to nine weeks per year. The changes are projected to be the most pronounced in southeastern Hudson Bay.
The Belcher Islands are an archipelago in the southeast part of Hudson Bay. The Belcher Islands are spread out over almost 3,000 square kilometres (1,160 sq mi). Administratively, they belong to the Qikiqtaaluk Region of the territory of Nunavut, Canada. The hamlet of Sanikiluaq (where the majority of the archipelago's inhabitants live) is on the north coast of Flaherty Island and is the southernmost in Nunavut. (Source: Wikipedia)
Image Credit: NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response Story: Adam Voiland Instrument(s): Aqua - MODIS Release Date: June 6, 2017
June 5, 2017: The physical processes causing global sea-level rise are highlighted in this animation. The main causes are thermal expansion of oceans, as they accumulate the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the melting of ice from the ice sheets and glaciers, as well as changes in land water storage such as lakes. Regionally, sea level changes vary quite dramatically. The reasons for this are different to the global causes of sea-level changes and include changes to sea water density, influenced by salinity and temperature.
The mass of the Greenland ice sheet has rapidly declined in the last several years due to surface melting and iceberg calving. Research based on observations from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites indicates that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.03 inches (0.8 millimeters) per year. These images, created from GRACE data, show changes in Greenland ice mass since 2002. Orange and red shades indicate areas that lost ice mass, while light blue shades indicate areas that gained ice mass. White indicates areas where there has been very little or no change in ice mass since 2002. In general, higher-elevation areas near the center of Greenland experienced little to no change, while lower-elevation and coastal areas experienced up to 13.1 feet (4 meters) of ice mass loss (expressed in equivalent-water-height; dark red) over a 14-year period. The largest mass decreases of up to 11.8 inches (30 centimeters (equivalent-water-height) per year occurred along the West Greenland coast. The average flow lines (grey; created from satellite radar interferometry) of Greenland’s ice converge into the locations of prominent outlet glaciers, and coincide with areas of high mass loss.
