Author Archives: werdercj

New Discoveries: The New Age of Astronomy

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

This picture compares the inner planets of our solar system to Kepler-62, a newly discovered planetary system NASA’s Kepler mission has recently discovered three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” or the range of distances form a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water.  It is planets like these […] Continue reading →

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Impacts on Saturn and the Drake equation

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed meteors colliding with Saturn’s thin rings.  This marked the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings, although astronomers already expected this to be occurring regularly.  However, specific details of such impacts were merely speculation, much of which is cleared up via […] Continue reading →

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Transiting Exoplanets: The Search for Terrestrial Worlds

Posted on April 10, 2013 by werdercj

On Monday, NASA announced a new project scheduled to launch in 2017: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  This project was selected after a three-year competition, and will use surveys covering 400 times as much sky as any past missions to discover transiting exoplanets.  This struck me as particularly significant having just studied methods of […] Continue reading →

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Nearby Star System Discovered

Posted on March 20, 2013 by werdercj

Above: an artist’s conception of the binary system On the same note of new discoveries, Kevin Luhman, a researcher in Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, just discovered a pair of stars that constitute the closest star system found in a century, and the third-closest star system we have ever discovered.  The binary […] Continue reading →

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Life on Mars?

Posted on March 20, 2013 by werdercj

Recently, we’ve been emphasizing comparative planetology in our work.  This has prompted studies of each planet in our solar system, which made it clear that many of our questions remain unanswered.  We know that Mars had a warmer, wetter period billions of years ago, and have much evidence indicative of abundant liquid water flows in […] Continue reading →

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Near-Earth Objects: Experiences and Implications

Posted on February 20, 2013 by werdercj

Meteor trail over Eastern Russia. On February 15, 2013, two very significant astronomical events occurred unusually close to us; the highly publicized meteor explosion over a Russian city overshadowed the close approach of a much larger asteroid orbiting Earth.  The contrast between these two events is what struck me as most interesting and informative about […] Continue reading →

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Astronomy’s Evolving Role in Society

Posted on February 20, 2013 by werdercj

Above: Stonehenge is an ancient structure in England that was used to mark the seasons. Archaeoastronomy is the study of ancient structures in search of astronomical connections.  It shows how people in the past understood and utilized phenomena they observed in the sky.  To me, the most interesting part of this is the progression of […] Continue reading →

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Historical Astronomers in Context

Posted on February 10, 2013 by werdercj

Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571- November 15, 1630) Johannes Kepler was initially hired as Tycho Brahe’s apprenctice.  When Tycho died, Kepler was left to make sense of his observations; after years of analyzing them and trying to make sense of them in terms of circular orbits, he finally realized that planetary orbits are ellipses, not circles.  […] Continue reading →

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How Technology Changed the Sky

Posted on January 28, 2013 by werdercj

Technology shapes modern astronomy. When thinking about the night sky, one thing that strikes me as particularly fascinating is that humans have been observing and analyzing this same sky for many thousands of years.  However, it has had such different meaning for each successive group to observe it.  Although we see the same movements and […] Continue reading →

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Light-Years: The Key to the Past

Posted on January 28, 2013 by werdercj

Speed of light: 300,000 km/second One topic I’ve found particularly interesting to read and think about is the speed of light and its implications.  We’ve learned that light travels at about 300,000 km/second; first off, this number alone is unfathomably large to me.  When I thought about how fast light travels, and then learned that […] Continue reading →

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