Using data collected by the Kepler space telescope, a group of researchers led by asteroseismologists from the University of Birmingham discovered five planets orbiting the star Kepler-444. They’re small rocky planets: the smallest has a size similar to Mercury, the largest has a diameter about three-quarters of the Earth. Another special feature is that the star Kepler-444 is very ancient, with an age estimated to around 11.2 billion years.
In March 2014, the announcement that the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment had detected gravitational waves in the perturbations in the cosmic microwave background radiation existing in the universe was sensational. This echo of cosmic inflation occurred shortly after the Big Bang was an extraordinary discovery. Unfortunately, a collaboration between the BICEP2 experiment and the team of ESA’s Planck space telescope has determined that those weren’t gravitational waves but probably emissions caused by galactic dust.
