Exoplanets

The "Automated Planet Finder" could make astronomers of us all

Pseudo-Earths are out there. That's the message of today's exciting announcement that a planet about the same size as Earth lives in its star's habitable zone--the temperate region around a star where liquid water might flow.

What is our cosmic significance? Does it even make sense to ask a question like that? If you happen to find yourself in Cleveland, Ohio this coming Thursday evening, and stop by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History at 8pm you can catch me talking about this.

                  This week has seen the release of the latest set of ‘confirmed’ exoplanets from NASA’s Kepler mission.

A trove of 715 planets—all members of multiworld systems—joins the list of Kepler's finds
 

A research team has shed more light on how Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine could orbit two stars, which are themselves bound together in an orbital dance

Astronomers have come up with a shopping list of what a planet needs to support life, perhaps even better than our Earth does, making them "superhabitable." Michael Moyer reports 

 

Earlier this week I had the very great pleasure of catching up with Lee Billings, the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude, a beautifully written and provocative new book about the quest to find other Earths, other life in the universe.

More to explore: Bizarre Asteroid with Six Tails Spotted by Hubble Telescope (Space.com) Liftoff! India’s First Mars Probe Launches Toward the Red Planet (Space.com) Kepler Telescope Finds Plethora of Earth-Size Planets (Scientific American) Chelyabinsk Eyewitnesses Help Scientists Resolve Meteor Mysteries (Scientific American) Gravity Maps Reveal Why the Moon’s Far Side Is Covered with Craters (Nature [...]

Robotic exploration of space is fascinating, complex and quite important to our understanding of the universe. To learn more about how scientists and engineers overcome challenges of robotic space exploration for successful data collection, join us for a live chat today (Tuesday, October 29) at noon EDT with Chris Impey, astronomer and author of Dreams of [...]

                          On November 14th 1971 NASA’s Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet.

  More to explore: Exoplanet colour confirmed for first time: it’s blue, but not pale — and nothing like Earth (Scientific American Blog Network) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/b… Diamond ‘Super-Earth’ May Not be Quite as Precious (University of Arizona) http://uanews.org/story/diamond-super… Strange Exoplanet’s ‘Backwards’ Orbit Explained by Extra Star, Planet (Space.com) http://www.space.com/19421-backward-a… Astronomers Find Most Ancient Planet Yet (Scientific [...]