Category Archives: Exoplanets

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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TESS: a New Eye in the Sky

Posted on April 10, 2013 by zvgio

NASA has a new project set to launch in 2017 and it’s going to be big. The TESS project will be tasked with the most trendy task in astronomy these days: finding exoplanets. Using a slew of wide-view cameras, TESS will peer tirelessly at the stars looking for “transits,” or dips in brightness when an […] Continue reading →

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Protoplanet Publicity

Posted on April 10, 2013 by burnspress

Scientists have located what they believe to be the first direct observation of a planet forming in its stellar womb of gas and dust. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Sascha Quanz and an international team of scientists has been studying the young star HD 100546 and its surrounding gas. They were surprised when they spotted […] Continue reading →

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Searching the Sky

Posted on April 9, 2013 by a2megal

In class this week I was curious about how astronomers are able to constantly search for exoplanets. On one hand, I knew that the Kepler Space Telescope had played an integral part in discovering the roughly 2,740 exoplanetary candidates as of January 2013. However, keeping in mind how vast space is and how quickly exoplanets […] Continue reading →

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Habitable Exoplanets

Posted on April 9, 2013 by kevinm387

Researchers at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo have developed a rank ordering system of comparing exoplanets to Earth called the Earth Similarity Index. Using this system, scientists have been able to highlight a few exoplanets similar to Earth and have determined which ones are the most similar to Earth. To visit the website, […] Continue reading →

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Exoplanets in the Habitable Zone

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Will K

  According to recent astronomical discoveries, there are much more Earth sized exoplanets in the habitable zone than scientists previously thought. In a study of cool stars, called M-dwarfs, researchers found that rocky, medium sized exoplanets could be relatively common. The possibility of a moderate climate and liquid water is greater for these planets when […] Continue reading →

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Exoplanets

Posted on April 3, 2013 by juliettealper

Our lecture on exoplanets in class today reminded me of an article that I saw a few months ago about the discovery of new exoplanets. After looking deeper into it, I realized that just a month ago scientists discovered 2,700 objects that could potentially be considered planets. Not only is this a possibility, but around […] Continue reading →

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Kepler 37b

Posted on March 20, 2013 by brendanfeeley

The smallest exoplanet that has been discovered is Kepler 37b.  It is very small, being about the size of the moon, and is also believed to be terrestrial.  Scientists speculate that Kepler 37b is very much like Mercury, being hot, barren, and geologically inactive.  Also, like Mercury, it is orbits very close to its parent […] Continue reading →

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Solar System Website

Posted on January 27, 2013 by kevinm387

This image comes from solarviews.com, a cool website that has lots of info on our Solar System. It has pages about each of the planets, their moons, asteroids and much more. It also has info about other things like exoplanets and the Oort Cloud, which is a spherical cloud that surrounds our Sun and extends […] Continue reading →

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Awesome Planetary Formation Videos

Posted on March 14, 2012 by drgrundstrom

In class on Monday, I showed a whole bunch of videos that show planetary formation – some showed certain parts better than others but they all are pretty awesome.  Just in case anyone wanted to look at them again, here they are: Short, beginning of formation (from gas cloud to disk) from ESA – here […] Continue reading →

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