Where science and tech meet creativity.

Kepler First Science

This is the morning of Kepler. I’m currently sitting in a the Marriot Ballroom watching the speaker, William J Borucki (NASA/Ames) gear up to announcing planets. This amazing mission has been imaging the same rich stellar field over and over looking for...

Resonating Worlds

I want to start by saying the following story is drawn from a pre-print, and the planet I’m about to talk about has not yet been directly detected. This is just a really neat little paper that offers a new way to look at things. In a new pre-print over on...

In Search of Alien Air

Looking for planets is a difficult task. Planets are physically small (compared to stars), physically faint (compared to stars), and are consistently located next really bright objects (those would be the stars). Looking at planets isn’t much different from...

All that’s sorta new in Exoplanets

Yesterday’s big afternoon press conference was all about exoplanets. The scientists took us on a tour de force of planet related press releases that went from little M stars and their tiny habitable zone, to a new press release on 28 planets, to planets found...

Twilight on Earth,
Morning on Gleise 581c

There are certain questions and dreams that drive society in its quest for the stars. Is there life beyond the Earth? How (and when) will we reach other worlds? What will it take to reach other worlds with life? For a long time, astronomers thought that we were still...

Helix hides Comets in its Core

It is easy in astronomy to lump different objects into specific groups. At the top-most level, there are stars, galaxies, planetary systems (including asteroids and comets), and dust-bunnies interstellar and intergalactic media (clouds and nebula). Looking a bit...