By Elizabeth Tasker The media was abuzz last week with the latest NASA news conference. A neural network -- a form of artificial intelligence or machine learning -- developed at Google had found two planets in data previously collected by NASA’s prolific Kepler Space Telescope. It’s a technique that could ultimately track-down our most Earth-like …
The Very Influential Natalie Batalha
I'd like to make a slight detour and talk not about the science of exoplanets and astrobiology, but rather a particular exoplanet scientist who I've had the pleasure to work with. The scientist is Natalie Batalha, who has been lead scientist for NASA's landmark Kepler Space Telescope mission since soon after it launched in 2009, …
Some Spectacular Images (And Science) From The Year Past
This is a golden era for space and planetary science, a time when discoveries, new understandings, and newly-found mysteries are flooding in. There are so many reasons to find the drama intriguing: a desire to understand the physical forces at play, to learn how those forces led to the formation of Earth and ultimately us, …
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The Ever More Puzzling, And Intriguing, "Tabby's Star."
Substantial, sun-like stars are not supposed to dim. They start with gravity and pressure induced nuclear reactions, and then they burn brighter and brighter until they either explode (go supernova) or burn all their fuel and become small, enormously dense, and not very bright "white dwarfs." Of course, the transit technique of searching for exoplanets …
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The Still Mysterious "Tabby's Star"
It's been eight months since citizen "Planet Hunters" working with Yale postdoc Tabetha Boyajian announced the discovery of a most unusual star, or rather a star where something most unusual was intermittently and erratically happening. The puzzle began with some light curve data, taken over a four year period, by the Kepler Space Telescope The …
A Flood of Newly Confirmed Exoplanets
In the biggest haul ever of new exoplanets, scientists with NASA's Kepler mission announced the confirmation of 1,284 additional planets outside our solar system -- including nine that are relatively small and within the habitable zones of their host stars. That almost doubles the number of these treasured rocky planets that orbit their stars at …
A Dwarf Star Produces a Major Discovery
The detection of potentially habitable exoplanets is not the big news it once was -- there have been so many identified already that the novelty has faded a bit. But that hardly means surprising and potentially breakthrough discoveries aren't being made. They are, and one of them was just announced Monday. This is how the …
The Borderland Where Stars and Planets Meet
Results from two very different papers in recent weeks have brought home one of the more challenging and intriguing aspects of large exoplanet hunting: that some exoplanets the mass of Jupiter and above share characteristics with small, cool stars. And as a result, telling the two apart can sometimes be a challenge. This conclusion does …
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On Super-Earths, Sub-Neptunes and Some Lessons They Teach
Part 2 of 2 With such a large proportion of identified exoplanets in the super-Earth to sub-Neptune class, an inescapable question arises: how conducive might they be to the origin and maintenance of life? So little is actually know about the characteristics of these planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune …
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Counting Our Countless Worlds
Imagine counting all the people who have ever lived on Earth, well over 100 billion of them. Then imagine counting all the planets now orbiting stars in our Milky Way galaxy , and in particular the ones that are roughly speaking Earth-sized. Not so big that the planet turns into a gas giant, and not so …
Many Worlds 