Seeing the first images of extrasolar planets around a star is a stunning moment. I found out about this earlier in the week, and have had to keep quiet (along with all the other journalists) until the embargo passed, but feast your eyes on this.
The speckle pattern is what’s left of the star’s light [...]
Posts in the "ESP" Category
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Another report from the SDSS conference is up on the Discovery blog, but I wanted to write about the penultimate talk, describing the next stage for the survey.
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Sloan has been through two phases of operation already, and now SDSS-III is about to start, incorporating four separate surveys, each with a different mission. The first, [...] -
I’m sitting at the back of the second press conference of the day, desperately swapping between laptops to run the Astronomy Cast Live feed, catch up with press releases from the speakers and to write this.
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Currently, we’re listening to the announcement of the smallest extrasolar planet to date, a 3 Earth Mass planet orbiting a [...] -
Astronomy can sometimes feel like an arms race between observers and theorists. Both groups are often convinced that they’re completely right and – at least over a drink at the end of the day – take great pride in being ahead of the game. The latest battleground is in the field of extrasolar planets, and [...]
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I’ve said again and again that the most exciting area of observational astronomy at the moment is the search for extrasolar planets. It’s incredible to think that in not much more than a decade we’ve moved from finding the first planet in a solar system other than our own to having several hundred in the [...]
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Excellent news! I’ve written before about SuperWASP’s planet search, and I’m pleased to say that they’ve just announced their second round of successes. Three new planets are announced today, detected by the small dip in their parent stars’ brightness as the planet passes in front of it. WASP-3 was discovered by the first set of [...]
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I’ve mentioned before just how difficult it is to find extrasolar planets. I’ve also made little secret of the fact that I’m a huge fan of the SuperWASP experiment which adds lenses to professional standard CCD cameras, essentially getting rid of the telescope in order to monitor a huge area of sky for faint dips [...]
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NASA’s Kepler mission is one of the furthest advanced of all of the missions designed to search for extrasolar planets, and is due for launch next year. I’ve just listened to a NASA science press briefing, which included lots of good stuff from right across planetary science and astrophysics. (The highlight was probably details of [...]
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The launch of COROT is excellent news, but the work is only just beginning for the team behind what will be the first of several planet-hunting missions. The hard bit is extracting the tiny signal which represents the transit of a Earth across the face of a star from the huge mass of data. COROT’s [...]
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One of my favourite stories out of all of those we’ve covered on the Sky at Night in the last three years was that of SuperWASP. WASP stands for the Wide Angle Planet Search, and the idea is to scan as much of the sky as possible, as quickly as possible, in order to catch [...]
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