Weekly Space Hangout – May 12, 2017: James Trefil & Michael E. Summers Present “Exoplanets”

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Please Note: This episode has some audio issues. Please excuse the echoes and volume variation! Special Guest: We welcome Michael Summers and James Trefil to the show to discuss their new book, Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets and the New Search for Life Beyond Our Solar System. Congratulations to …

Weekly Space Hangout – February 24, 2017: 7 New Exoplanets Around TRAPPIST-1 and More!

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Guests: Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg) Their stories this week: Discovery of 7 exoplanet system TRAPPIST-1 Alan Stern proposes a new definition of a planet Juno to stay in longer orbit We use a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would …

The Race To Image Exoplanets Heats Up!

Thanks to the deployment of the Kepler mission, thousands of extrasolar planet candidates have been discovered. Using a variety of indirect detection methods, astronomers have detected countless gas giants, super Earths, and other assorted bodies orbiting distant stars. And one terrestrial planet (Proxima b) has even been found lurking in the closest star system to …

Spinning Worlds: Orrery of Kepler’s Exoplanets, Part IV

The past few years, Daniel Fabrycky from the Kepler spacecraft science team has put together some terrific orrery-type visualization of all the multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. An orrery, as you probably know, is a a mechanical model of a solar system, and the metal or plastic ones available these days usually show …

More livable than Earth? New index sizes up the habitability of alien exoplanets

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised a new habitability index for judging how suitable alien planets might be for life, and the top prospects on their list are an Earthlike world called Kepler-442b and a yet-to-be confirmed planet known as KOI 3456.02. Those worlds both score higher than our own planet on the index: 0.955 …

Astronomy Cast Ep. 367: Spitzer does Exoplanets

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about different ways astronomers are searching for exoplanets. But now we reach the most exciting part of this story: actually imaging these planets directly. Today we’re going to talk about the work NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has done viewing the atmospheres of distant planets.