Latest Johannes Kepler Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists have determined the 16th-Century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe most likely was not poisoned after all. Brahe was thought to have died of a bladder infection, but previous exhumation found traces of mercury in hair from his beard, leading to theories he may have been poisoned instead. Some speculated he had been killed on orders from the Danish king, or by fellow astronomer Johannes Kepler. A team of Danish and Czech...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online Their projects might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a pair of University of California, Berkeley scientists have been awarded grants to aid in their study of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations and alternate universes, the school announced on Friday. Astronomer Geoff Marcy, who intends to review information from the Kepler Space Telescope in the hopes that he can find evidence of otherworldly beings capable of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A bright new star outshone even Jupiter in 1604 and then it dimmed over several weeks. Johannes Kepler and other sky watchers witnessed this event, and centuries later, the debris left from this stellar explosion is known at the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have studied the Kepler supernova remnant for a long time trying to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded. New analysis of a long observation by NASA's...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have used NASA's Kepler to help spot another planetary system that has its planets neatly aligned, similar to our own Solar System. The study shows the trio of planets orbiting the star within one degree, relative to each other, and relative to the star's equator, showing a sense of geometry in its alignment. “In our solar system, the trajectory of the planets is parallel to the rotation of the sun, which shows they...
Researchers working on NASA's Kepler Mission have discovered an unlikely pair of planets -- one similar to our planet, and the other roughly the size of Neptune -- locked in a surprisingly close orbit around a distant star located more than a thousand light years from Earth. The work, which was led by Joshua Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and University of Washington Associate Professor of Astronomy Eric Agol, discovered that the smaller planet, which was...
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The formation of small worlds like Earth previously was thought to occur mostly around stars rich in heavy elements such as iron and silicon. However, new ground-based observations, combined with data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, shows small planets form around stars with a wide range of heavy element content and suggests they may be widespread in our galaxy. (Logo:...
Why stop at the dark side of the moon to make music when you can look thousands of light years into space? That’s what a team of Georgia Tech researchers have done, using data from two stars in our galaxy to create sounds for a national recording artist. Over the years, researchers in Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab (SonLab) have converted numerical data into sounds to analyze stock market prices, election results and weather data. When the reggae/rock band Echo Movement called wanting...
A newly discovered possible exoplanet some 1,500 light years away is being shredded by the intense heat of its parent star. The team from NASA and MIT found that the planet circles its host star every 15 hours, making it one of the shortest planetary orbits ever observed, which implies that the planet orbits very close to the star. Being so close would heat the surface to at least 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, causing rocky material on the surface to melt and evaporate. The disintegrating...
New research shows that other sun-like stars in the universe can send off flares much larger than those seen on our sun. Solar flares are the result of broken magnetic-field loops as they pass through sunspots. As these loops become twisted and contorted, the flares occur, sending enormous amounts of charged particles, energy and radiation outward. So far, the largest solar flare ever measured on our sun happened on September 1, 1859, by British astronomer Richard Carrington. He simply...
More than a 150 years ago, before Neptune was ever sighted in the night sky, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted the planet's existence based on small deviations in the motion of Uranus. In a paper published today in the journal Science online, a group of researchers led by Dr. David Nesvorny of Southwest Research Institute has inferred another unseen planet, this time orbiting a distant star, marking the first success of this technique outside the solar system. Using a...
Latest Johannes Kepler Reference Libraries
Sample Entry: Astronomy is the scientific study of stars, planets, comets, galaxies, and other phenomena that occur outside Earth's atmosphere (e.g. cosmic radiation). Astronomy deals with the evolution, physics, chemical makeup, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, and also the formation of the universe. The word Astronomy comes from the Greek words astron (meaning "star") and nomos (meaning "law"). Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. Since the dawn of man, people always...
Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion -- The astronomer Johannes Kepler's main contribution to astronomy was his three laws of planetary motion. Kepler found these laws empirically by studying extensive observations recorded by Tycho Brahe. He found the first two laws in 1609 and the third one in 1618. Isaac Newton was later able to derive the laws from his laws of motion and gravity, thereby producing strong evidence in favor of Newton's inverse-square gravitational law. Kepler's First...
Tycho Brahe -- Tycho Brahe (December 14, 1546 - October 24, 1601) was a Danish astronomer. He had Uraniborg built; which become an early "research institute". For purposes of publication, Tycho owned a printing press and paper mill. His best known assistant was Kepler. Tycho realized that progress in the science of astronomy could be achieved, not by occasional haphazard observations, but only by systematic and rigorous observation, night after night, and by using instruments of the...
