Latest Astronomical transit Stories

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The transit signatures of two distinct planets were seen in the data for the sun-like star designated Kepler-9. The planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c. The discovery...

NASA reported on Thursday that its Kepler spacecraft discovered a planetary system with two planets crossing in front of the same star. This is the first planetary system discovered with more than one planet transiting in front of the same star.  The two planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c.  The findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science. Kepler's camera measures tiny decreases in the stars' brightness that occurs when a planet transits in from of them.  This...

A team of astronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars. The group, led by Dr Gracjan Maciejewski of Jena University in Germany, used Transit Timing Variation to detect a planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth in the system WASP-3, 700 light years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra. They publish their work...

A large group of scientists, including Jay Pasachoff, Bryce Babcock, and Steven Souza at Williams College, reveal the character of one of the most distant objects in the solar system in a scientific paper which appeared in the June 17 issue of the journal Nature. In observing the object named 2002 TX300 on October 9, 2009, as it passed in front of a distant star, they could tell what its surface is like and its size.For several years, Pasachoff, Babcock, and Souza have worked with James...

HONEY BROOK, Pa. Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Neopart LLC, a national leader in transit parts distribution, announced the appointment of Ray Melleady as Vice President of its Parts Management Services group. Melleady joins Neopart from the Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) in Albany, NY where he served as Executive Director, responsible for overall leadership of CDTA's 650 person transit organization. Prior to that, he was director of operations for CDTA. Prior to CDTA, he...

A team of astronomers from University College London (UCL), including undergraduate students, have discovered that an exotic world passes directly in front of the Sun-like star it orbits, revealing for the first time that it is about the same size as Jupiter. And rather than traveling to one of the major observatories in Hawaii or Chile, the students made the discovery with a telescope at UCL's University of London Observatory (ULO) in the capital's northern suburb of Mill Hill.The work was...

Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy.Due to its large mirror and location in outer space, the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in...

On February 24, 2009, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a photo sequence of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. The moons, from far left to right, are the white icy moons Enceladus and Dione, the large orange moon Titan, and icy Mimas. Due to the angle of the Sun, they are each preceded by their own shadow.These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from the Earth. Saturn's rings will...

Something is about to happen on Saturn that's so pretty, even Hubble will pause to take a look."On Feb. 24th, there's going to be a quadruple transit of Saturn's moons," says Keith Noll of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. "Titan, Mimas, Dione and Enceladus will pass directly in front of Saturn and we'll see their silhouettes crossing Saturn's cloudtops"”all four at the same time."Hubble won't be the only one looking. Amateur astronomers will be able to see...

Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptune orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. While Neptune has a diameter 3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth's, the new world (named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earth masses.HAT-P-11b was discovered because it passes directly in front of (transits) its parent star, thereby blocking about 0.4 percent of the star's light....