Blogs by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members
Habitable Zone Planet Finder Team
- HPF Discovers a Potentially Earth-like Exoplanet That Could Be Imaged by Next-Generation TelescopesIntroduction From the start of the HPF project, we have talked about how the instrument was designed to discover small exoplanets in the habitable zones of cool, nearby stars. In the meantime, we have shared a lot of science with … Continue reading →
- HPF Confirms the First Exoplanet Discoveries from Gaia AstrometryIntroduction: Discovering Exoplanets with Gaia Gaia is a spacecraft dedicated to making ultra-precise measurements of the positions and on-sky motions of billions of stars. The technical name for this measurement is astrometry, and the astrometric data collected by Gaia is invaluable … Continue reading →
- HPF Discovers a Giant Exoplanet in a Highly Disturbed OrbitA video showing the extreme orbit of TIC 241249530b. As the planet makes its closest approach to the star, it becomes brighter due to the increase in incident stellar radiation. Video credit: Abigail Minnich, Penn State University Today, the HPF … Continue reading →
- HPF Discovers a Close-In Neptune Orbiting a Very Low-Mass StarArtist’s rendering of the Neptune-mass exoplanet orbiting the very low-mass star LHS 3154. Video Credit: Abigail Minnich Introduction As the name implies, the Habitable-zone Planet Finder was designed primarily to search for Earthlike planets orbiting nearby stars. Its sensitivity to … Continue reading →
- TOI-3785 b: A Low-Density Neptune Orbiting an M-dwarf StarBy Luke Powers The planet now known as TOI-3785 b was observed in 2019 by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS observed periodic dips in the star’s brightness (known as a transit) that occurred every 4.67 days. As TOI-3785 … Continue reading →
NEID Spectrograph Team
- NEID Discovers a Potentially Earth-like Exoplanet That Could Be Imaged by Next-Generation TelescopesToday, the NEID Science Team, alongside the Science Team for NEID’s sister spectrograph HPF, announced the discovery of the exoplanet GJ 251c. GJ 251c is a potentially terrestrial-mass exoplanet in the liquid-water habitable zone of a very nearby M dwarf, … Continue reading →
- NEID Confirms the First Exoplanet Discoveries from Gaia AstrometryDiscovering Exoplanets with Gaia Gaia is a spacecraft dedicated to making ultra-precise measurements of the positions and on-sky motions of billions of stars. The technical name for this measurement is astrometry, and the astrometric data collected by Gaia is invaluable for … Continue reading →
- Orbital Migration in Process: NEID Discovers a Giant Exoplanet in a Highly Disturbed OrbitIntroduction Today, the NEID Science Team announced the discovery of the exoplanet TIC 241249530b, a giant exoplanet with some truly remarkable properties. The planet follows an oblong, highly eccentric orbit around its star; if we compare it to objects in … Continue reading →
- NEID measures a spin-orbit angle for a long period planetBackground The TESS mission continues to discover fruitful exoplanet systems ripe for various types of detailed study, including with NEID. Recently, we investigated the spin-orbit angle of a planet in the TOI-1670 system. The NEID team has investigated this kind … Continue reading →
- Constraining the Spin-Orbit angle of the Young Warm Neptune TOI-2076b with NEIDBeyond Discovery High-resolution, super-precise instruments like NEID can do much more than just discover new exoplanets and measure their masses. For certain planets, NEID may be able to detect molecules in their atmospheres, or–as we will see here–measure detailed properties … Continue reading →
Jason Wright: AstroWright
- Planck Frequencies as Schelling Points in SETIEarly when I was learning about SETI I was reading about “magic frequencies” and the “Water Hole.” Back in the early days of radio SETI, instrumental bandwidths were pretty narrow, so Frank Drake and others had to guess what frequencies to observe at to find deliberate signals. One wants a high frequency to avoid interference […]
- Is SETI dangerous?Interdisciplinarity in science can be wonderful: combining expertise across disciplines leads to new insights and progress because it’s only when people from those disciplines communicate about a particular problem that progress is made, and that happens much more rarely than communications among members of a single discipline. It’s important, though, when working across disciplines to actually […]
- The astrophysical sources of RV jitterA big day for our understanding of RV jitter! Penn State graduate student Jacob Luhn has just posted two important papers to the arXiv. You can read his excellent writeup of the first of them here: https://sites.psu.edu/jacobkluhn/2020/04/30/paper-highlight-radial-velocity-jitter-of-600-planet-search-stars/ It took Jacob a HUGE amount of work to determine the *empirical* RV jitter of hundreds […]
- On Meeting Your HeroesFreeman Dyson died on Friday. He was a giant in science, possibly the most accomplished and foundational living physicist without a Nobel Prize. He was 96. He had a big influence on my turn to SETI. I’ve written about him several times on this blog, including about his “First Law of SETI Investigations”, his role […]
- Technosignatures White PapersHere, in one place, are the white papers submitted last year to the Astronomy & Astrophysics decadal survey panels: “Searching for Technosignatures: Implications of Detection and Non-Detection” Haqq-Misra et al. (pdf, ADS) “The Promise of Data Science for the Technosignatures Field” Berea et al. (pdf, ADS) “A Technosignature Carrying a Message Will Likely Inform us […]
Facebook Pages by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members
Twitter Feeds by Center for Exoplanet & Habitable World Members
- Jason Wright: @Astro_Wright
- Steinn Sigurdsson: @steinly0
- The Habitable Zone Planet Finder Team: @HPFspectrograph
- NEID: @NEID_at_WIYN
