Several stories stick in my mind as we approach the New Year, presented here in no particular order, but merely as material for musing. The detection (by the MEarth Project) of a transiting 'super-Earth' this past month opens up interesting areas for speculation. Gliese 1214b is roughly 6.5 times as massive as Earth, orbiting an M-dwarf some forty light years from our Solar System. You'll recall we discussed this one in terms of possible study of its atmosphere. Abundant Small Worlds On the always interesting systemic site, Greg Laughlin notes that the orbital period of this planet is a mere 1.58 days. In fact, the planet is separated from the system barycenter by 0.014 AU, which turns out to be the smallest separation yet measured for any planet. What stands out here is the density of the red dwarf. Says Laughlin: "Gliese 1214 is more than twice as dense as lead. The density of the Sun, on the other hand, is bubblegum by comparison." The result: a planet/star separation that isn't...

With much of the US east coast to the north of me digging out from the recent storm, I can only think how fortunate I am not to be trying to travel right now. The snow-clogged airports and snarled streets that are all over the news do have their effect on my thinking, though, which may be why I was reminded this morning of a much colder place, a certain Saturnian moon whose most recent image now offers yet more proof of the active hydrology going on there. Titan got a bit lost in the shuffle here late last week but I don't want to ignore this compelling new image. What we're looking at is the flash of sunlight reflecting off one of Titan's lakes. It's not a huge surprise, given that we've identified lake-shaped basins that ought to have been ideal for liquid methane. But now that the Sun is directly illuminating the northern lakes as spring breaks out on that part of Titan, we can take advantage of conditions there to see things like this, taken with Cassini's visual and infrared...

What a welcome event the release of James Cameron's new film Avatar must be for scientists working on the question of exomoons -- satellites orbiting extrasolar planets. Imagine being a Lisa Kaltenegger (CfA) or David Kipping (University College London), hard at work exploring exomoon detection and possible habitability when a blockbuster film is released that posits a habitable moon around a gas giant. The film's exomoon, called Pandora, fits a scenario that exomoon hunters tell us could exist, orbiting a giant planet in the habitable zone of its star, and it draws public attention as never before to exoplanet and exomoon detections. Interesting exomoon scenarios beyond gas giants are also possible, as this image shows. We're learning that we can detect exomoons using tools like transit time duration measurements, and there are other methods, too, like microlensing and distortions of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. A paper from Kipping that we examined here recently makes the case...

Picking up on yesterday's theme of planetary detections from ground-based observatories, we now get word of the detection of a transiting 'super-Earth' -- one that may well have an atmosphere we can study -- with the kind of equipment many amateurs already use to observe the sky. The new world is GJ 1214b, about 6.5 times as massive as the Earth, orbiting a small M-dwarf about a fifth the size of the Sun some forty light years from Earth. But there's more, a good deal more. At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the planet orbits its star every 38 hours, with an estimated temperature a little over 200 degrees Celsius. Because GJ 1214b transits the star, astronomers are able to measure its radius, which turns out to be 2.7 times that of Earth. The density derived from this suggests a composition of about three-fourths water and other ices and one-fourth rock. Some of the planet's water should be in the form of exotic materials like Ice VII, a crystalline form of water that is found at...

What jumps out at the reader when examining yesterday's exoplanet news is not so much that we've found as many as six low-mass planets, but that the two stars involved are both near twins of the Sun. Steven Vogt (UC-Santa Cruz) and Paul Butler (Carnegie Institution of Washington) led this work, and Vogt is quick to point out that two of the planets are 'super-Earths,' the first we've ever found around stars so similar to our own. Vogt notes this has implications for the broader hunt for planets that could sustain life: "These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away." A Bonanza Around 61 Virginis And Sun-like they are, these stars. 61 Virginis, 28 light years from Earth, has long fascinated astrobiologists because it is more similar to the Sun than any of our nearest neighbors in terms of age, mass and other properties. Moreover, a separate team working with the...

We don't exactly know what to call GJ 758 B, which may be a brown dwarf or simply a large planet of between ten and forty Jupiter masses. But the detection is being hailed as the first direct observation of a 'planet-like object' orbiting a star similar to our own Sun. We have the new High Contrast Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics (HiCIAO), recently attached to the Subaru Telescope and working in the near infrared, to thank for the detection. Image: The August 2009 discovery image of GJ758 B and C, taken with Subaru HiCIAO in the near infrared wavelength. Without angular differential imaging, the star's speckle halo (burst-like feature in the center) would overwhelm the signals from the planet candidates. Credit: Subaru Telescope/NAOJ. Masking the star's intense light and using a technique known as angular differential imaging, HiCIAO seems to promise great things in the way of future direct detections of exoplanets, where the object is directly seen rather than having its...

You won't want to miss an interview with Debra Fischer now available on the MarketSaw site. The latter is a blog focused on 3D motion pictures, and thus the interest in Fischer's work on Alpha Centauri draws from a cinematic base. Specifically, James Cameron's new movie Avatar depicts a gas giant with a habitable moon around it, and the MarketSaw editors are interested in whether such a planet could exist around one of the Centauri stars. The interview that follows, discussing Fischer's ongoing hunt for Centauri planets, is prime reading. I'll quote from it, but you'll want to read the whole thing (thanks to Vincenzo Liguori for the tip). As to the gas giant question, we can answer that one quickly. Neither Centauri A nor Centauri B is orbited by a gas giant. We know this because enough data have accumulated on the question to rule such planets out. Stable orbits, says Fischer, don't reach out much further than 2 AU around either star, and the lack of gas giants leaves smaller worlds...