Citizen scientists discovered an unusual new solar system not even NASA could find

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In NASA’s efforts to explore the endless expanse of space, the agency eventually came to a realization: there is simply too much data. Missions like the one embarked upon in 2009 by the Kepler space telescope yield such a tremendous amount of data that there’s no efficient way for an individual scientist or even a team of scientists at NASA to pour through it all. That’s when they made a realization — instead of handling everything internally, NASA could make this data publicly available so that citizen scientists all over the world would be able to dig in.

Last year, NASA made this data available to the world through a program called Exoplanet Explorers, allowing citizen scientists to gain access to all of the information recorded by Kepler on its missions. More than 10,000 people registered to explore the data within the first 48 hours of its availability, and it looks like all that work paid off. The California Institute of Technology recently announced that a new planetary system was discovered by citizen scientists.

The new system has been named K2-138, and scientists believe it consists of five or possibly six planets orbiting a star. The planets are all between 1.3 and 3.3 times the size of Earth, though the system is too far away to determine much else about the planets. What scientists have been able to determine, however, is the planets’ unusual orbit around their star.

The planets appear to be orbiting the star in a “resonance chain” pattern, which means each planet takes about 1.5 times as long to orbit the star than the next closest planet. This pattern is the reason astronomers think there is a sixth planet orbiting the star as well; the fifth planet they’ve been able to identify appears to “skip a link” in the chain. – READ MORE

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Jupiter is, scientifically speaking, not great for humans. The gravitational pull is about 2.4 times that of Earth, and its atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium. Even within our own Solar System, there are much better candidates for sustaining life, even including some of Jupiter’s own moons.

But from space, it’s far harder to see Jupiter’s hostility to life forms. In fact, this color-enhanced image of Jupiter’s cloud belts, taken by the Juno spacecraft, makes the planet look positively inviting.

The image was taken by Juno on December 16th, during the probe’s tenth-closest flyby of the gaseous giant. Although the image looks close, that’s mostly because Jupiter is huge. At the time of capture, Juno was 8,453 miles from Jupiter. – READ MORE

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When astronomers at NASA capture images of far-off galaxies, they typically appear only as tiny red dots. These distant celestial bodies are so far away that even the strongest telescopes are usually incapable of distinguishing between the many stars contained within a galaxy. In an exciting turn of events, however, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture a rare up-close view of the farthest and oldest galaxy known to man. In fact, this particular galaxy is so old that it’s nearly as old as the Universe itself.

In a remarkable case of being in the right place at the right time, NASA scientists managed to capture a remarkably detailed shot of a galaxy called SPT0615-JD. The name might not be very catchy, but the significance of this image is huge. The image below shows the oldest galaxy known to man with an amount of detail that should be impossible.

“This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the farthest galaxy yet seen in an image that has been stretched and amplified by a phenomenon called gravitational lensing,” NASA explained in a post on its website. – READ MORE

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