The Egyptian monarch Khufu was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, which dates him back to the earlier years of the Old Kingdom period around the 26th century BC. I mention this figure, about which all too little is known, because his name is a link between the great monuments of an early culture (Khufu seems to have commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza) and present-day engineering. Imagine how wondrous the Great Pyramid would have been to the average passerby of the time, and then realize that Khufu's Hellenized name was Cheops, a monicker reflected in the acronym of our recently launched CHEOPS exoplanet observatory. I always enjoy untangling acronyms, some of which are more labored than others. Did you know, for example, that the name of the Japanese IKAROS solar sail is actually an acronym standing for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun? Then there's OSIRIS-REx (also satisfyingly Egyptian), which weighs in as Origins, Spectral Interpretation,...

An Australian amateur astronomer named Thiam-Guan Tan has made a name for himself in the realm of exoplanets. Tan participated in the discovery of an exoplanet that may orbit within its star's habitable zone. LHS 1140 b is a super-Earth some 41 light years from Earth that orbits a red dwarf star. Back in September of 2016, with a number of professional observatories looking at the host star, Tan provided key data to help verify the existence of LHS 1140b. "It was fortunate that I was able to catch a transit," said Tan, a retired engineer with a 12-inch telescope who has also discovered several supernovae. He is quoted in a newspaper called The West Australian as saying "That night, the Centre for Astrophysics had lined up five other telescopes across Australia and Hawaii to observe but they were all clouded out." Tan's work with exoplanet transits continues, an illustration of the role that talented amateurs with affordable equipment (Tan's telescope cost $15,000) can play. Image:...

Calling it a ‘chance discovery,’ the University of Warwick’s Boris Gänsicke recently presented the results of his team’s study of some 7,000 white dwarf stars, all of them cataloged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. One drew particular interest because chemical elements turned up in spectroscopic studies indicating something unusual. Says Gänsicke, “We knew that there had to be something exceptional going on in this system, and speculated that it may be related to some type of planetary remnant.” And that makes the star WDJ0914+1914 an example of what a stellar system that survived, at least partially, the red giant phase of its host star might look like as a planet orbits the Earth-sized white dwarf. This work, which draws on data from the European Southern Observatory’s X-shooter spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, confirms hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur associated with the white dwarf, all found in a disk of gas around the star rather than being present in the white...