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NASA: We found 7 Earth-sized planets just 40 light years away
During a news conference in Washington DC Wednesday, NASA revealed that, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they've found seven new Earth-sized planets orbiting a star just 40 light years away from us. What's more, three of those exist within the "Goldilocks zone" which could be habitable for life.
Keck Observatory's exoplanet imager captures its first photos
The W.M. Keck Observatory's near infrared camera has a new instrument that gives it the power to capture images of Jupiter-sized exoplanets near their stars. That instrument is a vortex coronagraph, and it has recently taken its first two photos. One of them (top left) is a photo of the innermost of three dust discs surrounding a young star 380 light-years away. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory team who published the study about the image combined the coronagraph's data with Spitzer telescope's and NASA's WISE mission's, they were able to conclude that the disc is made up of pebble-sized grains of olivine. That's one of the most common silicates on Earth.
