Building public interest in deep space is a long-term goal for most of us in the interstellar community, and the release of the film Interstellar this fall may set off a new round of discussion among reviewers and movie fans alike. Also helpful is the DVD release of the Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos series, given Tyson’s performance and the stunning visuals that communicate the majesty and power of the universe around us. But I think it’s encouraging that while these blockbuster media releases work their magic, what used to be staid scientific conferences frequented only by specialists are turning into media events of their own. The American Astronomical Society is currently meeting in Boston, with exoplanet papers that I’m already seeing discussed well outside the usual venues. The more we see the excitement and sheer scope of the exoplanet hunt communicated to the public, the more likely we’re building the kind of interest among young people that may one day turn into scientific...

Given the high quality imagery returned by Cassini on an almost routine basis, it's interesting to remember how little we knew about Saturn's moon Titan back in November of 1980, when Voyager 1 made its closest approach to the planet. Think of the options the Voyager 1 team had in front of it. The craft could have been sent on to Uranus and Neptune, a trek Voyager 2 would later accomplish. It could have preempted New Horizons if, on a different trajectory, it had been sent to Pluto. But Titan had the allure of a thick atmosphere, making it an irresistible target. Deflecting Voyager 1 past Titan meant taking it out of the plane of the ecliptic, canceling the other two options, and the frustration of the Titan images the spacecraft returned is summed up in the view we see at the right, a moon whose surface is completely obscured. The visually impenetrable atmosphere was also found to be topped by a thick layer of haze. Learning about that atmosphere was hugely important for planetary...

A friend asked me the other day whether my interest in exomoons -- moons around exoplanets -- wasn't just a fascination with the technology of planet hunting. After all, we've finally gotten to the point where we can detect and confirm planets around other stars. An exomoon represents the next step at pushing our methods, and a detection would be an affirmation of just how far new technology and ingenious analysis can take us. So was there really any scientific value in finding exomoons, or was the hunt little more than an exercise in refining our tools? I've written about technology for a long time, but the case for exomoons goes well beyond what my friend describes. We've found not just gas giants but 'super-Earths' in the habitable zones of other stars, and it's a natural suggestion that around one or both classes of planet, an exomoon might he habitable even if the parent world were not. It's a natural assumption that moons exist around other planets elsewhere as readily as they...

Given how many planet-hosting stars we’re finding, any markers that can tell us which are most likely to have terrestrial worlds would be welcome. New work out of Vanderbilt University is now providing us with an interesting possibility. Working with the university’s Keivan Stassun, graduate student Trey Mack has developed a model that studies the chemical composition of a given star and relates it to the amount of rocky material it has ingested during the course of its lifetime. Stars with a high amount of such material may be places where small, terrestrial worlds are rare. What Mack has done is to look at the relative abundance of fifteen specific elements. According to this Vanderbilt news release, he was most interested in elements with high condensation temperatures like aluminum, silicon, calcium and iron, the kind of materials that become building blocks for planets like the Earth. In this context, it’s important to remember that stars are 98 percent hydrogen and helium, with...

How do you go about characterizing a directly imaged planet around another star? In the absence of a transit, one way is to apply theoretical models of planetary formation and evolution to the light spectrum you're working with. When a team of researchers led by Marie-Ève Naud (a graduate student at the Université de Montréal) used these methods on direct imaging data from four different observatories to characterize a planet 155 light years from the Earth, they arrived at a temperature of some 800 degrees Celsius. The work drew inferences based upon the location of the newly detected world. For the planet, GU Piscium b, orbits a star that is a member of the AB Doradus moving group, some 30 stars that move together with the star AB Doradus. The AB Doradus association is helpful because a moving group is made up of stars of roughly the same age and metallicity, a sign they probably formed in the same location. The fact that these are young stars, perhaps 100 million...

Anyone who follows this site is well aware of David Kipping's work as Principal Investigator of The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler, which sifts through the voluminous Kepler data in search of exoplanet satellites. Now based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), David lists a number of research interests including the study and characterization of transiting exoplanets, the development of novel detection and characterization techniques, exoplanet atmospheres, Bayesian inference, population statistics and starspot modeling. Yesterday he wrote with news that will get the attention of anyone interested in stars near the Sun. A transit search of Proxima Centauri, never before attempted, is about to begin. By David Kipping I wanted to let Centauri Dreams readers know that I'm leading an upcoming observing campaign with MOST this month and the mission's PI, Jaymie Matthews, recently shared with us an important decision by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) on May 1st which...

Writing yesterday about Kevin Luhman’s discovery of another cold brown dwarf in the stellar neighborhood reminded me of work we discussed earlier this year in which the weather on the surface of Luhman 16 B was mapped. This was done using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (see Focus on the Nearest Brown Dwarfs), which found variations in the brightness of one of the two dwarfs in this interesting binary just six light years from the Sun. We are beginning, in other words, to chart features in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf whose atmosphere is 1100 degrees Celsius and filled with molten iron and minerals. With that in mind, the news that Dutch astronomers also using the Very Large Telescope (with the CRIRES spectrograph) had measured the rotation rate of an exoplanet immediately caught my eye. Beta Pictoris b orbits its primary some 63 light years from Earth in the constellation Pictor (The Painter’s Easel). It was one of the first exoplanets to be directly...