Dan Majaess
Citizen Scientists Hunt for Impact Craters in Persia
Citizen scientists have discovered planets beyond our Solar System and established morphological classifications for thousands of galaxies (e.g., the Planet Hunters and…
Astronomers Refine Distances to our Closest Spiral-Galaxy Neighbors
M31 and M33 are two of the nearest spiral galaxies, and can form the basis for determining distances to more remote…
Dust Complicates Determinations of the Distance to Galactic Center
Obtaining an accurate distance between the Sun and the center of our Galaxy remains one of the principal challenges facing…
Astronomers Hint that our Sun won’t Terminate as the Typical Planetary Nebula
Textbooks often cite that planetary nebulae (PNe, plural) represent an endstate for lower-mass single stars. But conversely, recent research suggests…
Are Our Textbooks Wrong? Astronomers Clash Over Hubble’s Legacy
“No scientific discovery is named after its discoverer," - Stigler/Merton. Edwin Hubble's contributions to astronomy earned him the honor of having…
Kepler Team Identifies Planet Impostors that are Binary Stars in Disguise
Observations by the Kepler satellite have advanced our knowledge of stars and their orbiting planets, yielding more than 100 confirmed…
Russian Asteroid Explosion and Past Impactors Paint a Potentially Grim Future for Earth
The recent meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk brought to the forefront a topic that has worried astronomers for years, namely that an impactor…
Spock Weighs in on President Obama’s ‘Meld-Gate’
On March 1st 2013, President Obama awoke hoards of Star Trek and Star Wars fans when during a press conference…
Nearby Ancient Star is Almost as Old as the Universe
A metal-poor star located merely 190 light-years from the Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old, which implies that the star is…
Narrowing Down the Hunt for Giant Exoplanets
Despite advances in exoplanet research over the past decade much remains unknown. For example, how do the detection rates of giant…