New Find for NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope

Kepler Space Telescope

Earlier this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released reports of a new planet (Kepler-10b) found orbiting a sun-like star some 560 light years from earth. The discovery was made with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

While the primary focus of the telescope is finding new planets like the recent discovery, the new announcement from the space administration is regarding a star formation. The formation KOI-126 (A, (B, C)), known as a triplet, was discovered as the telescope was looking at hundreds of thousands of stars in its search for orbiting planets.

The three stars, in a tighter than expected orbit with each other, were at first mistakenly thought to be planets in orbit about a single star. Two of the stars, KOI-126 B and C, are much smaller than the third, KOI-126 A,at a mass only about .2 percent that of our sun.

Finding stars this small is typically very difficult because they are too dim to be spotted from earth. In this case, however, researchers were able to spot them as they passed in front of the larger parent star. For NASA scientists this creates a rare opportunity to study stellar objects this small and put some theories to the test.