BloG
Welcome to the EOS/Alien Earths team's Blog where we share the research results we are most excited about.The curious case of KIC 8462852
The curious case of KIC 8462852 by Theodora Karalidi Discovering the first planet, other than our Earth, that hosts life is one of the holy grails of astronomy. This is a difficult task since planets that could host life are pretty small compared to their...
Exoplanets around Red Dwarf Stars
Exoplanets around Red Dwarf Stars by Gijs Mulders Since the discovery in 1995 of the first exoplanet over two-thousand exoplanets have been discovered. Most exoplanets, such as those discovered by the Kepler spacecraft, orbit stars similar in mass to the sun....
First Results From the Scorpion Planet Survey
By Kevin Wagner Searching for planets outside of our own solar system is one of the great challenges in modern astronomy. The problem consists of measuring the brightness of a planet that is more than a million times fainter than its host star, while being so close to...
Exoplanets, Cats, and Telescopes: Ben and Min at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope
We, Min Fang and Ben Rackham, are on a five-night observing run at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT), where we are collecting spectra of young stars. This post gives some of the highlights of our trip so far. The VATT is located in southeastern Arizona...
Gijs Mulders’ “Preferred Hosts for Short-Period Exoplanets” highlighted by AAS NOVA
Preferred Hosts for Short-Period Exoplanets In an effort to learn more about how planets form around their host stars, a team of scientists has analyzed the population of Kepler-discovered exoplanet candidates, looking for trends in where they’re found. Since its...
EOS Scientists Discover Elegant Spiral Arms in Planet-forming Disk
Link to the UA Press Release on the discovery
Report from the NExSS Kick-off Meeting at NASA HQ
A blog entry on the kick-off meeting of the new NExSS program at NASA HQ by PI Daniel Apai: http://distantearths.com/nexss-kick-off/
UA, ASU teams to search for alien life
Article appeared in the Arizona Daily Star: http://tinyurl.com/nteh6h4 April 22, 2015 7:29 pm • By Tom Beal “I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30...
NExSS Program and EOS Selection Announced
NASA’s NExSS Coalition to Lead Search for Life on Distant Worlds NASA is bringing together experts spanning a variety of scientific fields for an unprecedented initiative dedicated to the search for life on planets outside our solar system. The Nexus for Exoplanet...
Volatile Delivery to Planets around Red Dwarf
EOS team investigators Fred Ciesla, Ilaria Pascucci, and Daniel Apai publish a paper on the delivery of volatiles to low-mass planets orbiting red dwarf stars. The team finds that including more realistic starting conditions (a larger number of planetesimals and...
EOS Postdoctoral Position Opens at U Chicago
Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks and primitive materials at the University of Chicago. The successful applicant will work directly with Professor Fred Ciesla and in collaboration with...
Hubble gets best view of a circumstellar debris disk distorted by a planet
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disk that has a giant...