One of the joys of science fiction is imagining landscapes. What would it be like to stand on Titan, for example, a question that was inescapably influenced in my youth by Chesley Bonestell’s wonderful depictions, as well as novels like Larry Niven’s World of Ptavvs (1966) or Michael Swanwick’s novelette “Slow Life” (Analog, December 2002). And then, of course, there were those multi-star skies, as in Asimov’s “Nightfall” (Astounding Science Fiction September, 1941. The Science Fiction Writers of America, incidentally, voted “Nightfall” the best science fiction story written prior to 1965, when the Nebula Awards began. I would bet almost all Centauri Dreams readers are familiar with it, but if not, it’s widely anthologized. And now we have another visual phenomenon to contend with, a landscape and its sky that had never occurred to me. A team led by Grant Kennedy (University of Warwick, UK) has discovered the first confirmed case of a multiple star system whose surrounding disk of...

Barnard’s Star b, the planet announced last November around the second nearest star system to the Earth, has been the subject of intensive study by an international team led by Ignasi Ribas at the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), and Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC). As announced at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, the work helps to refine the age of Barnard’s Star and examines its potential for supporting life on its known planet. We don’t know whether there are other planets around Barnard’s Star, but the fact of Barnard Star b’s existence is significant, according to Scott Engle (Villanova University), who along with colleague Edward Guinan presented the results in Seattle. Says Engle: “The most significant aspect of the discovery of Barnard’s Star b is that the two nearest star systems to the Sun are now known to host planets. This supports previous studies based on Kepler Mission data, inferring that planets can be very...

We can identify a number of circumstellar disks, but most are too far away to provide internal detail, much less the kind of activity that seems to be showing up around the red dwarf AU Microscopii. For at 32 light years out in the southern constellation Microscopium, AU Microscopii is presenting us with an unusual kind of activity that may have repercussions for the question of life around red dwarf stars in general. As presented at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, fast-moving blobs of material are eroding the disk. The consequence: Icy materials and organics that might have developed in asteroids and comets may instead be pushed out of the disk, long before they could provide the infall of materials thought to have benefited planets like ours. "The Earth, we know, formed 'dry,' with a hot, molten surface, and accreted atmospheric water and other volatiles for hundreds of millions of years, being enriched by icy material from comets and asteroids transported...

We are entering the greatest era of discovery in human history, an age of exploration that the thousands of Kepler planets, both confirmed and candidate, only hint at. Today Ashley Baldwin looks at what lies ahead, in the form of several space-based observatories, including designs that can find and image Earth-class worlds in the habitable zones of their stars. A consultant psychiatrist at the 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust (Warrington, UK), Dr. Baldwin is likewise an amateur astronomer of the first rank whose insights are shared with and appreciated by the professionals designing and building such instruments. As we push into atmospheric analysis of planets in nearby interstellar space, we'll use tools of exquisite precision shaped around the principles described here. by Ashley Baldwin This review is going to look at the current state of play with respect to direct exoplanet imaging. To date this has only been done from ground-based telescopes, limited by atmospheric turbulence...