1. INDYTech

Nasa announcement live: Latest updates as space agency reveals mysterious news from its planet-hunting mission

Live Blog

There have been few clues about what's going on

Nasa is preparing for a major announcement after its planet-hunting telescope found something in space.

Details on the revelation are sparse. But the agency only holds such events for significant breakthroughs, leading to speculation about what the Kepler space telescope might have found.

All Nasa has said is that it will hold an event at 1pm eastern time, or 6pm in the UK. It will be livestreamed on its website, and all the latest news will be shared here.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

  • 1/30 Earth from the ISS

    From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset

    Nasa

  • 2/30 Frosty slopes of Mars

    This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter

    Nasa

  • 3/30 Orion Capsule splashes down

    The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars

    Nasa

  • 4/30 The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch

    The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays

    Nasa

  • 5/30 Yellowstone from space

    NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account

    Nasa

  • 6/30 Black Hole Friday

    Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes

    Nasa

  • 7/30 NuSTAR

    X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

    Nasa

  • 8/30 Saturn

    This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan

    Nasa

  • 9/30 Worlds Apart

    Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass

    Nasa

  • 10/30 Solar Flare

    An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory

    Nasa

  • 11/30 Solar Flare

    An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013

    Nasa

  • 12/30 Cassiopeia A c

    A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory

    Nasa

  • 13/30 Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy

    An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

    Nasa

  • 14/30 Mars Rover Spirit

    Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack

    Nasa

  • 15/30 Morning Aurora From the Space Station

    Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station

  • 16/30 Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984

    The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts

  • 17/30 A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies

    Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity

  • 18/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant

    Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago

  • 19/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower

    The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower

  • 20/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple

    The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it

  • 21/30 Pluto image

    Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto

  • 22/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars

    The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta

  • 23/30 Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965

    This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3

  • 24/30 Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking

    For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)

  • 25/30 Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way

    This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way

  • 26/30 An Astronaut's View from Space

    Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014

  • 27/30 Giant Landform on Mars

    On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa”

  • 28/30 Expedition 39 Landing

    A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

  • 29/30 Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I

    Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere

  • 30/30 Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness

    This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

​The announcement gave some sparse details about what to expect. The discovery has been made using Google's artificial intelligence technology, it said, and it will almost certainly offer news about an exoplanet.

Those suggestions offer some clues about what is going to be announced, but otherwise everything will be revealed when the event begins.

Live Updates

Similar announcements in the past have yielded some of the most incredible parts of what we know about the universe. In February, for instance, scientists announced an entire solar system of exoplanets relatively near our own; in October it said it had found 20 new planets that could support life.

It's found so many that the big announcements only relate to the really exciting stuff, since Kepler has now spotted thousands of exoplanets.

We don't know very much about the announcement later on. But one thing we do know for sure is that it will involve the Kepler space telescope, one of the pieces of kit that Nasa is most proud of.

The telescope works by surveying the whole sky and logging when any stars get brighter or darker, which happens when a planet passes in front of them. If that's happening, then the brightness can be watched over time – and by studying the dimming, they can work out a whole host of things like how big it is and how close it might be to its star.

Once, finding just one planet with this method was a huge breakthrough, and before that it was something that scientist scould only dream of. But now it has become something of a commonplace – it regularly verifies hundreds of planets, though only some of them will be interesting or potential habitats.

Here's the AP's report on those three astronauts coming back down to Earth:

Three astronauts on Thursday landed back on Earth after nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.

A Russian Soyuz capsule with NASA's Randy Bresnik, Russia's Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency descended under a red-and-white parachute and landed on schedule at 2:37 p.m. local time (0837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. EST) on the vast steppes outside of a remote town in Kazakhstan.

The three were extracted from the capsule within 20 minutes and appeared to be in good condition.

Bresnik, Ryazansky and Nespoli spent 139 days aboard the orbiting space laboratory. The trio who arrived at the station in July contributed to hundreds of scientific experiments aboard the ISS and performed several spacewalks.

They left Alexander Misurkin, commander of the crew, and two Americans, Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei, in charge.

During their stay at the station, the crew had a phone call with Pope Francis who talked with the cosmonauts about Dante's verses and St. Exupery's "The Little Prince."

Bresnik, a U.S. Marine who flew combat missions during the Iraq war, told the pope what strikes him is that in space there are "no borders, there is no conflict, it's just peaceful."

Kentucky-born Bresnik also celebrated Thanksgiving in space, feasting on pouches of turkey with his colleagues.

The orbiting lab's crew of three will go back to a six-member team when NASA's Scott Tingle, Russia's Anton Shkaplerov and Japan's Norishige Kanai take off from Kazakhstan on Sunday.

Some other important Nasa news, ahead of the big announcement: the agency has just announced that its astronaut Randy Bresnik has returned to Earth with two of his crewmates. They'll be sending another one up, with two more crewmates, on Sunday.

We know very little for sure about what Nasa is about to announce. But from those few clues we can make some guesses about what it might cover – here's my attempt at doing that.

Please allow a moment for the liveblog to load.