Stars hum and throb, and the vibrations of this cosmic music could aid the NASA satellite Kepler in its goal of finding an Earth-like extrasolar planet. On 4 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington DC, the Kepler team announced that it had identified five new planets. These are the first to be found by the 1-metre telescope, which stares continuously at one swathe of sky and looks for the dimming as a planet crosses a star and blocks some of its light. (source: nature.com)
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