Astro Blog

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-planet-kepler-finally-confirmed-10-years-later Source:   By Lisa Grossman, Science News. Excerpt: A decade after being found, the first exoplanet candidate spotted by the Kepler space telescope has been confirmed as a real world. The planet orbits a star initially dubbed KOI 4, for Kepler Object of Interest 4 (KOIs 1 through 3 were known before Kepler launched in March 2009). ...The Kepler team originally thought the star was about 1.1 times the width of the sun, which would make the planet about the size of Neptune. But then astronomers saw a second dip in starlight as the world passed behind the star, called a secondary eclipse. That second dip shouldn’t be visible for such a small planet, so the exoplanet candidate was dismissed as a false alarm. ...KOI 4 is actually about three times the width of the sun, meaning its planet would be about three times as large as first estimated — or a bit larger than Jupiter, the team found. That’s ...

Source:   Lynn Yarris, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Excerpt: …an international panel of 41 experts in geology, paleontology  and other related fields, after an exhaustive review of the data, declared an end to a 30 year controversy over what triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs – an asteroid or volcanoes. The panel ruled in favor of the asteroid... the size of San Francisco, traveling faster than a bullet, slammed into Earth ...delivered a destructive blast thousands of times more powerful than the combined yield of all the world’s nuclear weapons, setting off earthquakes greater than 11 in magnitude and widespread tsunamis, and shrouding the globe for years in a thick cocoon of sky-blackening dust and debris.... newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/03/09/alvarez-theory-on-dinosaur/