Extrasolar Planets
Hubble Observes Planet-“Polluted” Dead Stars In Hyades
For those of us who practice amateur astronomy, we're very familiar with the 150 light-year distant Hyades star cluster -…
Watch Live Hangout: TESS and the Search for Exoplanets
Last month, NASA announced plans to launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2017. This is a satellite that…
How Do You Measure A Planet Near A Tiny Star?
When you sit back and think about how far away exoplanets are -- and how faint -- it's a scientific…
Habitable Worlds? New Kepler Planetary Systems in Images
The Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range…
Kepler Team Finds System with Two Potentially Habitable Planets
This might be the most exciting exoplanet news yet. An international team of scientists analyzing data from NASA's Kepler mission…
The Exoplanet Naming Debate Heats Up
Following last Friday’s press release from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) concerning the naming of extrasolar planets, a heated debate…
IAU Issues Response To Uwingu’s Exoplanet Naming Campaign
Given the popularity of the recent contest by Uwingu to suggest names for the closest known exoplanet to Earth (officially…
New Exoplanet-Hunting Mission to launch in 2017
Move over Kepler. NASA has recently green-lighted two new missions as part of its Astrophysics Explorer Program. These come as…
Astronomers Watch as a Black Hole Eats a Rogue Planet
In Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon narrowly escaped being devoured by an exogorth (space slug) slumbering inside an asteroid crater.…
Book Review: Vistas of Many Worlds
While many astronomy books are based around images that show us how the Universe appears to us right now, as…