Space & Astronomy

Kepler discovers its first rocky planet

By T.K. Randall
January 12, 2011 ·   comments

Image Credit: NASA After eight months of data collection by NASA's Kepler Telescope a new planet outside our Solar System has been discovered. The planet is 1.4 times the size of Earth and has been named Kepler-10b. Kepler-10b orbits its Sun once every 0.84 days and is more than 20 times closer to it than Mercury is to our sun. The new rocky planet is considered not to be in the habitable zone; the region of a planetary system where it would be possible to find liquid water, and therefore possible life, on a planet's surface.

Source: NASA | Comments ()

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