The final image from the Kepler Space Telescope has arrived. After nearly a decade of operation, NASA’s groundbreaking telescope ran out of fuel last year and was placed into permanent sleep on October 30. On September 25, the instrument captured one last image — a full view of the sky, tiled into a mosaic.
Kepler has been instrumental in helping astronomers understand our galaxy, providing them with a wealth of data as it scanned the sky for Earth-size exoplanets near the habitable zone around stars.
Over the past decade, Kepler collected 678GB of scientific data, documented 61 supernovae, and confirmed 2,662 planets, providing evidence for the publication of nearly 3,000 scientific papers. The telescope observed more than 530,500 stars in the Milky Way, many of which are accompanied by planets yet to be confirmed.
“This full frame image is the last time Kepler took a picture of its entire field of view,” Jessie Dotson, a Kepler project scientist at NASA, told Digital Trends. “The data taken over nine and a half years between the first and last image has been used to statistically prove that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy. Over 2,600 exoplanets have been discovered in Kepler’s data so far — and more are still being discovered as scientists continue to sift through our data.”
The star-field Kepler observed in its last hoorah include GJ 9827, a star around which Kepler detected three orbiting planets worthy of further observations, and the Trappist-1 system, an ultra-cool dwarf star that grabbed headlines when another NASA telescope, Spitzer, discovered seven Earth-size planets in its orbit. Three of those exoplanets orbited the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” making them potentially habitable.
The image isn’t perfect. Failure in parts of the camera caused portions of the mosaic to be blacked out. But the incomplete image only intensifies the mystery and beckons further exploration.
And Kepler wasn’t free from challenges during its operations. The telescope struggled with instrument malfunctions just a few years into its first mission, requiring engineers to develop clever fixes from a distance. Nonetheless, the telescope soldiered on and completed 19 observation campaigns. The telescope kicked the bucket during its “Second Light” mission.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.