Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

In the first full day of the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, I listened to scientific sessions on icy worlds and on an exoplanet in a four-star system.

Mat Kaplan

Okay, just the ones we know about. xkcd does it again.

Bruce Betts

Do planets circle our closest stellar neighbors, the system loved by science fiction: Alpha Centauri? We don’t know. But, Debra Fischer, Julien Spronck, and their colleagues at Yale University, in part with Planetary Society support, are trying to find out.

Emily Lakdawalla

Someone on Twitter pointed me to a paper recently posted to ArXiv titled

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's lineup is a largely astronomical crowd so most of the conversation concerned dark matter and boiling exoplanets and imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Emily Lakdawalla

A large team of researchers has announced in a Nature article the discovery of not one, but two, Earth-sized planets orbiting a star named Kepler-20. This article separates the observational facts from the quite-likely-to-be-true inferences from the downstream speculations.

Bill Nye

The Hubble Space Telescope has recorded its millionth observation. The planet is designated HAT-P-7b.

Meg Schwamb

On May 5 and 6, I had a run on the WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO) telescope, a 3.5 m telescope, the second largest telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona.

Konstantin Batygin

Some parallels exist between Odysseus' journey and the discoveries of exoplanets. What initially started out as a well-planned trip from Troy back to Ithaca, turned into a series of rather unfortunate events, with episodes of fighting Cyclops and having your crew turned into swine.

Charlene Anderson

Remember SETI@home? The ground-breaking computing project is now taking a look at candidate Earth-like planets that have been detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Emily Lakdawalla

Might there be many Titan-like planets and moons, with atmospheres and liquid methane rain, rivers, and lakes, across the galaxy? It's an important question if you think that liquid methane environments could support alien life, because it turns out that Titan-like planets might be more common than Earth-like planets.

Amir Alexander

Amir Alexander explains more about the FINDS Exo-Earths project and how it will help planet hunters detect distant Earths in the depths of space.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's some links to some good followup stories on Wednesday's Kepler press briefing.

Emily Lakdawalla

I wasn't able to watch the Kepler press briefing today so I will give you links to some of my favorite blogs for information on today's announcement, which follows a major data release last night as well as the publication of a paper in Nature.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Kepler exoplanet hunting mission has made news today with a report of

Emily Lakdawalla

The Planet Hunters website, like Zooniverse's other projects, is very, very easy to get up and running.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just a linky post here.

Susan Lendroth

With the astronomical community is buzzing with news of an exoplanet found in a star's habitable zone, The Planetary Society will co-sponsor a special event that will be streamed live on Monday, October 4.

Amir Alexander

Two nearly simultaneous announcements by scientists that they have detected entire planetary system deep in space have set the astronomical community abuzz.

Emily Lakdawalla

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to believe it's been going strong for so many years.