There have been a number of extremely interesting results when it comes to exoplanet research these past few years. Here I have put together some of my favourite ones.
Exoplanets are more common than stars
Source: Nature Letter, Public Ver [...]
From time to time I write these how to guides, both to help me remember what I did, but also to allow people like you to benefit from my experiences. There is no guarantee this will work for you, but hopefully this ‘how to’ will [...]
There are a few techniques we can use to study the atmosphere of an exoplanet. One of these techniques is called transmission spectroscopy, which is all about measuring the atmospheric absorption of an exoplanet atmosphere as a function o [...]
What great news! The star system closest to us, the Alpha Centauri System, has an exoplanet orbiting one of it’s stars. The new planet has a mass nearly identical to Earth but it’s far from habitable with an orbit much closer to [...]
Sometimes astronomers get lucky, real lucky. This was definitely the case for Hirano and his team of astronomers. Using data from the Kepler satellite they observed not only two simultaneous transits, but what in all likelyhood is a pla [...]
Three new sub-Jupiter mass exoplanets were announced today on astro-ph by the SuperWASP team. You can find the paper here. What I find very interesting about the paper is not that three new exoplanets were discovered, but that one of the pl [...]
ESO has just published a new coffee-table book in celebration of ESO’s 50th anniversary, and best of all, it is free to download. The book is full of great images both of the skies and the observatories.
Book cover “Europe to the St [...]
If you, like me, are intersted in exoplanets, you have probably come across the term “Earth-like” exoplanets in the media. Here are some prime examples:
Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed – BBC News
Kepler Team Confirms Fi [...]
The discovery rate of exoplanets has been nothing short of amazing. Back in 2000 the number of confirmed exoplanets numbered 19, whilst today we know of well over 800 exoplanets, with a whole bunch of Kepler candidates waiting to be confirm [...]
Spanish astronomers have today published a list of the darkest regions of the sky on astro-ph. Using the 10.4 m GTC telescope (the largest optical telescope in the world), they selectively probed the regions of the sky devoid of stars down [...]