Illustration of the Kepler-10 star system, located about 560 light-years away near the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. The Kepler telescope has discovered two planets around this star. Kepler-10b is a small rocky exoplanet shown as a dark spot against yellow sun. This planet, which has a radius 1.4 times that of Earth's, orbits the star every 0.8 days. The larger foreground object, the planet Kepler-10c. has a radius 2.2 times that of Earth's and orbits the star every 45 days. Due to their proximity to the star, both planets would be extremely hot and unlikely to harbour life. Kepler-10c was first identified by the Kepler telescope and later validated using a combination of a computer simulation technique called Blender and observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Both of these methods are powerful ways to validate the Kepler planets that are too small and faraway for ground-based telescopes to confirm using the radial-velocity technique.