Venus is continuing its long reign as the brilliant “evening star” this month. It’s in the west as night falls, in the middle of Taurus. That’s right where a planet-hunting space telescope is aiming right now. It’ll have to turn away in a couple of weeks, though, because the bull is dropping toward the Sun in our sky, and soon will be lost in the Sun’s glare. The Kepler spacecraft has already discovered more than a thousand confirmed planets, with another three thousand awaiting confirmation. Technical problems halted its initial search a couple of years ago. But a new one allows it to look for planets around a smaller number of stars in different regions of the sky. It aims at one patch for about three months, then turns to a new one as that part of the sky moves behind the Sun. The new mission is known as K2, and it’s already yielded at least one planet. The new world is bigger and heavier than Earth, and orbits quite close to its parent star, which is a bit smaller and cooler than t
