Kepler finds its first planets

摘要

Stars hum and throb, and the vibrations of this cosmic music could aid the NASA satellite Kepler in its goal of finding an Earth-like extrasolar planet.rnOn 4 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC, the Kepler team announced that it had identified five new planets. These are the first to be found by the 1 -metre telescope, which stares continuously at one swathe of sky and looks for the dimming as a planet crosses a star and blocks some of its light.