Today’s the day. At 1 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. BST), you can watch live as NASA makes an announcement about the latest discoveries made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope.
The news teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website, and we’ve also handily embedded the stream below for you to watch. During the event, you can tweet questions with the hashtag #askNASA.
So, what’s it all about? Well, we don’t know at the moment. Previous announcements have concerned planets similar to Earth that might be habitable, although we don’t know if we can expect the same thing this time around. The fact NASA references “discoveries,” rather than a single discovery, may mean it is a broader look at the Kepler mission as a whole.
We also can’t discern much from the panel of experts involved. There are three people from NASA and the Kepler mission, and a fourth, Timothy Morton, an associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey. His research involves understanding how planetary systems form and evolve, and he also helped increase the probability of Kepler finding real planets, rather than false positives.
Does this hold any clues? We’ll have to wait and see. You can watch the live stream below (scroll it down to see the video).