Extrasolar Planets
T Chamaeleon Gets Caught in the Act — Forming Planets, That Is
[/caption] An international team of astronomers peering at a young star in the constellation Chamaeleon have detected a smaller companion…
Plausibility Check – Habitable Planets around Red Giants
[/caption] While planets orbiting twin stars are a staple of science fiction, another is having humans live on planets orbiting…
Orrery of Kepler’s Exoplanets
Here's a terrific visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft as of February 2, 2011. The…
Continent-Wide Telescope Array Now Seeing 450 Million Light-Years Into Space
[/caption] Kitt Peak. Los Alamos. St. Croix. Pie Town. What do these places have in common? They each house one…
First-Time Views of Solar System Births
[/caption] Chalk up a sizzling success for the HiCIAO planet-hunter camera on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii: it's captured this unprecedented…
More Help on the Way for Verifying ExoPlanets in Kepler’s Dataset
[/caption] With the Kepler spacecraft finding over 1,200 planetary candidates, the next step is verifying their actual status. That will…
Astronomy Without A Telescope – Plausibility Check
[/caption] So we all know this story. Uncle Owen has just emotionally blackmailed you into putting off your application to…
Video Visualization of Kepler Exoplanet Data
This is really nifty: a visualization of the 1,235 exoplanet candidates observed by Kepler in the recently released data, created…
Kepler Discovers First Earth Sized Planets inside Habitable Zone
[/caption] With the startling new finding of dozens of Earth-sized extrasolar planets, NASA's Kepler planet hunting space telescope has just…
Kepler Discovers 6-Planet Exo-Solar System
Using data from the Kepler space telescope, scientists have discovered a horde of six planets orbiting a sun-like star, approximately…