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Planning a little space travel to see some friends on Kepler 22b? Thinking of trying out your newly-installed FTL3000 Alcubierre Warp Drive to get you there in no time? Better not make it a surprise visit — your arrival may end up disintegrating anyone there when you show up.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The primary objective of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which was launched in March 2009 to orbit the Sun, is to search for Earth-like planets in a portion of the Milky Way galaxy. But now a team of physicists has proposed that Kepler could have a second appealing purpose: to either detect or rule out primordial black holes (PBHs) of a certain mass range as the primary constituent of dark matter.

NASA's orbiting Kepler telescope has discovered its first planet in the habitable zone of another star. By "habitable," astronomers mean that a planet could harbor temperatures conducive to liquid water--and maybe life. [More]

Kepler project scientists join forces with a crowdsourcing research website and quickly bag two new exoplanets. First proteins, now planets. Regular people with regular jobs are getting a chance to chip away at scientific puzzles and contribute to discoveries, in what's turning out to be a big help for scientists, and an intriguing distraction for science geeks outside of academia.

The Kepler spacecraft has hit an unexpected obstacle as it patiently watches the heavens for exoplanets: too many rowdy young stars. The orbiting probe detects small dips in the brightness of a star that occur when a planet crosses its face. But an analysis of some 2,500 of the tens of thousands of Sun-like stars detected in Kepler's field of view has found that the stars themselves flicker more than predicted, with the largest number varying twice as much as the Sun

Bill Borucki is the principal investigator for NASA's planet-finding Kepler spacecraft. At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Borucki explained how long it will be before Kepler can tell us whether habitable, Earth-like planets are common or rare: [More]

At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Bill Borucki , principal investigator for NASA's planet-finding Kepler spacecraft, provided an update on Kepler's hunt for distant worlds, especially those Earth-like planets that might be habitable: [More]