Category: extrasolar planets

Just a short time after a tiny telescope got professional-quality data on two transiting planets, the heavy weight champion among transit detectors landed with its own new edition of the on going, space freak show of exoworlds. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics, Univ. of Washington,  and scads of other places report in Science this week discovery with the Kepler space telescope of two planets in orbit so close they're almost in each others britches. They are so close to...

It's interstellar space week for media that follow such things. The American Astronomical Society has gathered in Austin, TX, for its annual meeting. The meeting's press room is streaming its news conferences live on the internet. It's better to be there in person, cruising poster sessions for excloos and schmoozing in all directions, but the live stream ensures more reporting in total.

AAS Press Officer Rick Fienberg reports about 75 people registered for the press room on site, about two thirds of them reporters, editors, broadcasters and so on, with another two dozen or so public information officers. Most of the streaming press...

On Saturday the New York Times's Dennis Overbye had a hefty front page story, with a highly impressive graphic, describing the frustrating search for another star that hosts a planet of the right size and temperature to fit the too-long unfulfilled term "Earth-like planet." He talks to a good-sized list of reliable sources. It's a lively roundup, and spends a lot of its time sharing the suspicion among these experts that the odds for discovery of such a world as shrinking - certainly not however toward zero - even...

Great wobbling doppler shifts and shades of distant worlds, this is getting familiar. New planets are starting to seem about as newsy as the listings of homes that sold or police blotter summaries. Interesting, but rather routine. We've got hundreds of them so far.

To be sure the latest haul includes some weird ones. And by the way later this week, press advisories say, a second team is to announce yet another odd extrasolar world.

First up: On Monday the European Southern Observatory announced that one of its telescopes in Chile, equipped with an instrument called the HARPS spectrograph (for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher...

This is just synchronicity of no meaning, but somehow nothing but space news rose to attention this morning before time ran out (actually, SF Chronicle has a nice story of rare species like red foxes returning to the Sierra, but it's behind a pay wall for now). Below you'll see news bursts on dark matter, on sending astronauts one-way to Mars, and on separate discovery that one-way robots already there may see fresh signs of recent, very salty water.

The finale: news off a paper in today's Science by two UC Berkeley researchers who now, even more confidently than people like them have said before, say that Earth-sized planets must be exceedingly common. It's an...