NASA's Kepler finds massive alien planet 180 light years away


NASA's Kepler space telescope has discovered its first alien planet since malfunctioning in May 2013, and it's a big one: HIP 116454b is a "super Earth" about 20,000 miles wide and 12 times more massive than our planet.
"Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries," Andrew Vanderburg, the lead author of a study on the discovery, said in a statement. "Even better, the planet it found is ripe for follow-up studies."
This alien planet is 180 light years away from Earth in the Pisces constellation, and its density suggests it is either a "mini Neptune" with a thick atmosphere or a water world, Space.com reports. Kepler was launched in March 2009 with the goal of finding out how often Earth-like planets occur around the Milky Way, and so far it has found almost 1,000 confirmed planets and 3,200 "candidates."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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