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Kepler epitaph? Eight most intriguing finds of troubled telescope.

Kepler, the space telescope designed to help us find other Earth-like planets, is on the fritz. Scientists hope they will be able to fix it remotely, but if they can't, its brief, brilliant career could be over. Here are eight of its most important discoveries.

3. Kepler-11: Bizarre solar system

Tim Pyle /NASA/File
This artist's conception shows Kepler-11, a sun-like star around which six planets orbit.

Often, the most exciting scientific discoveries are those that aren't explainable by current scientific theories. The Kepler-11 system certainly left researchers scratching their heads.

The orbits of the first five planets could fit inside Mercury's orbit. The sixth could fit inside Venus's orbit. Finding so many planets bunched so close together was surprising enough. What made the discovery even more perplexing is that these weren't Mercury-size planetary minnows. Each was 2 to 4 times larger than Earth. 

And they weren't the same. The two innermost planets appeared to be a mix of rock and water, while the low mass of the next three suggest that "a substantial fraction of their volume must be made of hydrogen and helium gases," Jack Lissauer, a member of the Kepler team, told the Monitor when the announcement was made in February 2011.

It's a planetary system "of a type we had no idea existed," he said.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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