Kepler-186 and the Solar System: The diagram compares the planets of the inner solar system to Kepler-186, a five-planet system about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

and plenty of software solutions have been developed in the six years since the end of Kepler's primary mission to help facilitate crunching large sets of data to look for planets around other stars.

The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star.

Earth-like planets – are in the universe. The Kepler telescope launched on the early morning of March 7, 2009 aboard a Delta II medium-lift launch vehicle, the same vehicle that launched many ...

Planets change orbit shape around Neptune’s size. Metal-rich stars help giant planets form. Eccentric orbits suggest chaotic planet formation.

By staring continuously at more than 150,000 stars for four years, Kepler detected thousands of planets, using what’s called the transit method. It searched for the slight dimming of a star’s ...

Additionally, researchers can calculate a planet’s surface temperature from the world’s orbital period and its star’s temperature. Since its launch in 2009, NASA's Kepler mission has used ...

But it was not always so. Until the likes of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo came along, everyone thought the planets (that they knew about) revolved around Earth, and before even that, no one was ...