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Read MorePenn State set to lead on new exoplanet science priorities
A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sets the stage for Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds to expand its role in NASA’s exoplanetary science initiatives To answer significant questions about planetary systems, such as whether our solar system is a rare phenomenon or if life exists on planets other than Earth, NASA should lead a large...
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Read MoreHabitability of Exoplanet Water Worlds
“Water world” planets, those covered with a deep global ocean, could maintain surface conditions similar to that of the Earth for over a billion years, according to a new paper from Dr. Edwin Kite of University of the University of Chicago and Dr. Eric Ford of Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. Life has thrived on Earth for billions of years, despite substantial changes in the...
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Read MoreMeasuring Rocky Exoplanet Compositions with the James Webb Space Telescope
NASA NExSS and NPP postdoc Dr. Eva Bodman recently published a paper on “Inferring the Composition of Disintegrating Planet Interiors from Dust Tails with Future James Webb Space Telescope Observations”. This paper represents the outgrowth of a collaboration of Dr. Bodman with Dr. Steve Desch, PI of the ASU NExSS team and Dr. Jason Wright, PI of one of the two NASA NExSS teams at Penn State....
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Read MoreFirst Starlight for Habitable Zone Planet Finder
The Habitable zone Planet Finder (HPF) obtained its first observations of stars on 5 November. The figure displays a sample spectrum from the HPF’s High Efficiency mode, which shows the sky emission lines and stellar continuum in the 2D echelle image. The insert shows a narrow region of the spectrum near the infrared Calcium triplet lines. Congratulations to the entire HPF team on reaching this...
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Read MoreAstronomers discover sunscreen snow falling on hot exoplanet
Astronomers at Penn State have used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a blistering-hot giant planet outside our solar system where the atmosphere “snows” titanium dioxide — the active ingredient in sunscreen. These Hubble observations are the first detections of this “snow-out” process, called a “cold trap,” on an exoplanet. This discovery, and other observations made...
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Read MoreExtremely Precise Radial Velocities Workshop
Penn State hosted the Third Extremely Precise Radial Velocities workshop August 14-17, 2017. For more details, see the meeting website.
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Read MoreNew planet found to be hotter than most stars
A newly discovered Jupiter-like world is so hot that even its nights are like the flame of a welding torch. The gas giant has a “year” only 1.5 days long, and may have a tail like a comet. Planet KELT-9b is hotter than most stars. With a day-side temperature of more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,600 Kelvin), it is only about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 Kelvin) cooler than our own sun. “At these...
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Read MoreUpgraded Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dedicated
CEHW Professor Suvrath Mahadevan spoke on “Songs of Distant Earths” at the dedication for the freshly upgraded Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). He described the opportunities created by the Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), an infrared spectrograph that his team is building for HET. Read more from the McDonald Observatory press...
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CEHW students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and honorable mention
First year graduate student Mariah MacDonald was selected as a 2017 National...
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Introducing CyberLAMP, the Cyber-Laboratory for Astronomy, Materials, and Physics
National Science Foundation funds supercomputer cluster at Penn State February...
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A Flip-Flopping Climate Could Explain Mars’s Watery Past
A new hypothesis might reconcile two opposing theories that have tried to...
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A compact system of super-Earths & mini-Neptunes
Incoming Penn State graduate student, Mariah MacDonald, is first-author of a...
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Four synchronized planets reveal clues to how planets form
The search for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy has revealed an...
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CEHW-led Team Selected to Build Next-Generation Exoplanet-Hunting Spectrograph
The CEHW instrument team added a new planet-finding spectrograph to its...
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CEHW astronomers measure the mass of 10 small exoplanets
Astronomers at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds have measured...
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The most eccentric known exoplanet
CEHW Astronomers contributed to the recent discovery of the most eccentric...
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