about 2 years ago - 2 comments
The exoplanet 55 Cnc e may get its period and mass revised downward due to recent observations that support a paper from last year.
In short, we thought it had a period of 2.8 days and a minimum mass of 14 Mearth. This is from radial velocity measurements. The paper from last year, however, made the More >
about 2 years ago - 3 comments
Just saw this on astrobites.com: Could Rings Exist Around Kepler “Warm Saturns”?
It’s a new paper on arxiv.org that follows a couple of older papers that try to pin down the detectability of rings around exoplanets. In this case, the authors are focusing only on planets and candidate planets detected by Kepler. Astrobites does a good More >
about 2 years ago - 1 comment
There’s a lot of weird and silly stuff on arxiv.org, but the idea behind this paper is two too weirds to pass up (that is, two orders of magnitude more “weird” than usual).
Dark Matter And The Habitability of Planets
In many models, dark matter particles can elastically scatter with nuclei in planets, causing those particles to More >
about 2 years ago - 2 comments
From Discovery News:
There are at least 50 billion exoplanets in our galaxy. What’s more, astronomers estimate that 500 million of these alien worlds are probably sitting inside the habitable zones of their parent stars.
about 2 years ago - 1 comment
I get forwarded stuff. A forward I got today is for a week-old BoingBoing post about Greg Laughlin’s “exoplanet valuation” equation. Laughlin is essentially trying to find a way to quantitatively compare the importance of each exoplanet discovery. In this case, he’s trying to put it in terms of dollars and cents. I don’t see where on More >
about 2 years ago - 1 comment
I mentioned this about a month ago to this list, so I’d like to remind everyone about a great public outreach opportunity. We’re currently signed up for several slots in the 365DaysOfAstronomy.org podcast. This is a podcast open to submission from all over the world about any topic of interest related to astronomy. As such, More >
about 2 years ago - No comments
Justin just posted this on the email list:
The Kepler team has announced their first terrestrial-sized exoplanet discovery, Kepler-10b. It’s 4.6 Earth masses, 1.4 Earth radii (denser than Earth; more like solid iron or lead), and in an 0.84-day orbit. So, most likely way too hot to be habitable, but still, huge hope for detecting More >
about 2 years ago - 3 comments
Veselin sent this out to the email list a few weeks ago. PlanetHunters.org is an offshoot of the Galaxy Zoo project and a fun way to spend a few minutes (or hours) looking at light curves. Check out their introductory video:
Welcome to Planet Hunters from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.
about 2 years ago - 2 comments
From the Astrobiology Lectures listserv comes this announcement for Friday’s astrobiology lecture at STScI:
Friday, December 10, 2010 at 12:30 p.m. in the John Bahcall Auditorium – STScI (Light lunch provided and discussion at 12:00 p.m., talk at 12:30 p.m.) For more information see http://astrobiology.stsci.edu
Speaker: James Kasting, Penn State University
Title: HOW TO FIND A More >
about 2 years ago - No comments
We’ve got another lecture in the STSci Astrobiology Lecture Series coming up tomorrow! This month the lecture will be by Wes Traub from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. It’ll be in Mudd 100 at 12:30pm tomorrow. The lecture is entitled “Astrobiological Factors in Exoplanet Exploration Strategies.” The abstract:
What is the best strategy for finding More >
about 1 year ago
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