From the perspective of planet hunters and planet characterizers, a desirable solar system to explore is one that is close to ours, that has a planet (or planets) in the star's habitable zone, and has a host star that is relatively quiet. This is especially important with the very common red dwarf stars, which are …
Continue reading "Close and Tranquil Solar System Has Astronomers Excited"
This column was written for Many Worlds by Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett. Wong is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington's Astronomy and Astrobiology program and is a member of NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative as part of the university's Virtual Planetary Laboratory team. Bartlett is a postdoctoral …
Continue reading "Thinking About Life (or Lyfe) Through The Prism of “Star Trek”"
The image above, courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the CubeSat ASTERIA as it was being launched from the International Space Station in 2017. The size of a briefcase, ASTERIA is part of a growing armada of tiny spacecraft being launched around the world and adding an increasingly important (and inexpensive) set of …
Continue reading "For First Time, Tiny CubeSat Locates a Distant Exoplanet"
Earlier last week, NASA put out a release alerting journalists to "an exciting announcement about the agency’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission." Given the controversial history of the project -- the current administration has formally proposed cancelling it for several years and the astronomy community (and Congress) have been keep it going -- …
It was not all that long ago that a "map" of our moon, of Mars, of a large asteroid such as Vesta, of Titan, or of any hard-surfaced object in our solar system would have some very general outlines, some very large features identified, and then the extraterrestrial equivalent of the warning on Earth …
Change is the one constant in our world-- moving in ways tiny and enormous, constructive and destructive. We're living now in a time when a rampaging pandemic circles the globe and when the climate is changing in so many worrisome and potentially devastating ways. With these ominous changes as a backdrop, it is perhaps useful …
Continue reading "Everything Changes: The Rise and Fall of the Northern Ocean of Mars"
The surface of the sun, with each "kernel" or "cell" roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun's atmosphere, or corona) and …
Continue reading "Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability"
https://videopress.com/v/lEFuz7Sl?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmanyworlds.space%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F01%2FScreenshot-2020-01-27-at-22.42.43.png&preloadContent=metadata Explainer video for Earth-Like. (Vimeo edition with subtitles here) Are we alone? The question hangs over each discovery of an Earth-sized planet as we speculate on its habitability. But how different and varied could these worlds really be? Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of this potential diversity is to build a …
Continue reading "Exactly How Like Our Earth is an Earth-like Planet?"
When especially interesting new planets are discovered in the cosmos, scientists around the world begin the process of identifying their characteristics -- their orbit, their mass and density, their composition, their thermal properties and much more. It's all part of a drive that seems to be innate in humans to learn about the workings of …
When the the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, it featured the now-iconic two-sun, "circumbinary" planet Tatooine. At that time astronomers didn't really know if such solar systems existed, with more than one sun and at least one planet. Indeed, the first extra-solar planet wasn't detected until the early 1990s. And the first …
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