The Moon’s farside used to be a convenient setting for wondrous things. After all, no one had ever seen it, setting the imagination free to insert everything from paradisaical getaways (think Shangri-La in space) to secret technologies or alien civilizations. The Soviet Luna 3 image of 1959 took the bloom off that particular rose, but we also learned through this and subsequent missions that farside really does have its differences from the familiar face we see. More craters, for one thing, and fewer of the dark plains we call maria, or ‘seas.’ We can throw in measurements made by the GRAIL mission (the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) in 2012. GRAIL was a NASA Discovery-class mission that performed gravitational field mapping of the Moon as a way of examining its internal structure, a set of two probes that worked by analyzing measured changes in distance between the two craft as small as one micron. We wound up with a map of our satellite’s gravitational field that led to...

We should be glad to run into the unexpected when doing research, because things we hadn't foreseen often point to new understanding. That's certainly the case with infant planetary systems as observed through the circumstellar disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars. ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) has been central to the study of such targets. An array of 66 radio telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, the facility works at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths to provide detailed imaging of emerging systems. Because it has been revealing a variety of small-scale structures within circumstellar disks, ALMA is giving us insights into planet formation as we observe gaps, rings and spiral arms and their interactions with young planets. This is where the unexpected comes in. For researchers looking at a 5 million year old star called HD 163296 are seeing an unusual amount of dust, more than 300 times the mass of the Earth, despite the detection of at...

A planet labeled NGTS-4b has turned up in a data space where astronomers had not expected it, the so-called ‘Neptunian desert.’ Three times Earth radius and about 20 percent smaller than Neptune, the world was discovered with data from the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), which specializes in transiting worlds around bright stars, by researchers from the University of Warwick. It turns out to be a scorcher, with temperatures in the range of 1,000 degrees Celsius. NGTS-4b is 20 times as massive as the Earth, and its orbit takes it around its star, a K-dwarf 920 light years out, every 1.3 days. The planet is getting attention not so much because of what it is but where it is. Lead author Richard West (University of Warwick) comments: "This planet must be tough - it is right in the zone where we expected Neptune-sized planets could not survive. It is truly remarkable that we found a transiting planet via a star dimming by less than 0.2% - this has never been done before by...

I’m always interested in hearing about new ways to mine our abundant datasets. Who knows how many planets may yet turn up in the original Kepler and K2 data, once we’ve applied different algorithms crafted to tease out their evanescent signatures. On the broader front, who knows how long we’ll be making new discoveries with the Cassini data, gathered in such spectacular fashion over its run of orbital operations around Saturn. And we can anticipate that, locked up in archival materials from our great observatories, various discoveries still lurk. Assuming, of course, we know how to find them and, just as important, how to confirm that we’re not just looking at noise. What scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), the Georg August University of Göttingen, and the Sonneberg Observatory have come up with is 18 new planets roughly of Earth size that they’ve dug out of K2, looking at 517 stars that, on the basis of earlier analysis, had already been...

In a white paper submitted to the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics (Astro2020), Philip Horzempa (LeMoyne College) suggests using technology originally developed for the NASA Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), along with subsequent advances, in a mission designed to exploit astrometry as an exoplanet detection mode. I'm homing in on astrometry itself in this post rather than the mission concept, for the technique may be coming into its own as an exoplanet detection method, and I'm interested in new ways to exploit it. Astrometry is all about refining our measurement of a star's position in the sky. When I talk to people about detecting exoplanets, I find that many confuse astrometry with radial velocity, for in loose explanatory terminology, both refer to measuring the 'wobble' a planet induces on a star. But radial velocity examines Doppler effects in a star's spectrum as the star moves toward and then away from us, while astrometry looks for tiny changes in the position...

The term 'destruction radius' around a star sounds like something out of a generic science fiction movie, probably one with lots of laser battles and starship crews dressed in capes. It's a descriptive phrase as used in this University of Warwick (UK) news release, but let's go with 'Roche radius' instead. Dimitri Veras, a physicist at the university, probes the term in the context of white dwarfs in a new paper for Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Veras and collaborators are looking at what happens after the challenging transition between red giant and white dwarf, a time when planets will be in high turmoil. The idea is to model the tidal forces that occur once a star collapses into a super-dense white dwarf, blowing away its outer layers in the process. We see the clear potential for dragging planets into new orbits, with some pushed out of their stellar systems entirely. The Roche radius, or limit, is the distance from the star where a self-gravitating object...

Interdisciplinary approaches to new data offer a robust way to see past the conventions of a specialized field, noting connections that provide perspective and deepen understanding. That idea is sound across many disciplines, but it is getting new emphasis with an essay in Science asking whether we have not been too blinkered in our approach to astrobiology. After all, reams have been written about studying exoplanet atmospheres for biomarkers, but shouldn't we be studying how atmospheres couple to planetary interiors? "We need a better understanding of how a planet's composition and interior influence its habitability, starting with Earth," says Anat Shahar (Carnegie Institution for Science), one of the paper's four authors. "This can be used to guide the search for exoplanets and star systems where life could thrive, signatures of which could be detected by telescopes." Thus the paper's call for merging data from astronomical observations, mathematical modeling and simulations, and...