Info 202 Fall 2011

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/74449/title/Stellar_oddballs

The Kepler telescope, launched a little
over two years ago, has quietly been orbiting about the sun in
Earth's trail capturing the dimming and brightening of nearly 160,000
stars. Every 30 minutes for 24 hours a day Kepler takes a snapshot,
gathering the photometry of individual stars in the same patch of sky
between Cygnus and Lyra. This incredible wealth of data has already
yielded more than 1200 identifiable extrasolar planets for the
Kepler team as well as a growing list of unknown phenomenon. This