Announcing Kepler-69c – a super-Earth-sized planet in or near the habitable...
I’m about to do the press conference to announce this system but I wanted to make the paper available. The paper is available from here. The press conference should be on NASA TV now. Edit: A recording...
View ArticleWe’re back!
We’re back, and by that I mean the US government is back. For the last 16 days I’ve been locked out of my office at NASA Ames. As a contractor I’ve been allowed to work, indeed I’ve had quite a...
View ArticleRobust exoplanet masses from transit timing variations
I’m going to try to post on a semi-regular basis about whatever astronomy thing has interested me on a given day. it’s probably be a bit random and not well explained. Today I was chatting with some by...
View ArticleThe Two-Wheel Kepler Mission will be awesome
I was in a seminar last week where exoplanet science was described as being in the post-Kepler era. This phrase has much merit given how dramatically our understanding of exoplanet populations has...
View ArticleAn asteroid passing in front of Kepler
I’ve been playing with imaging data recently and found something, probably an asteroid, passing through the Kepler field of view. Its pretty relaxing if you loop it....
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A second planet with a comet-like tail
Last year Saul Rappaport and team reported the discover of what appeared to be a slowly disintegrating planet. The evidence pointing to this was a planet transit-like event of a body very close to its...
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The first K2 observation of a transiting exoplanet
My life has been consumed recently with planning for the K2 mission (a mission where Kepler observes into the ecliptic). The Senior Review proposal to NASA has just been submitted and we have received...
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K2 to observe M35 continuously for 75 days
The target list for K2 Campaign 0 (C0) was released earlier today. C0 is an engineering test primarily to learn about pointing over en entire campaign, but we hope to do some amazing science. The test...
View ArticleGiordano Bruno said some amazing things
I finally got around to watching the first episode new Cosmos. Coincidently, I’d been chatting to Jill Tarter from the SETI Institute the previous day so Carl Sagan was on my mind. We were chatting...
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How we designed the Kepler-186f artists concept image
Our Kepler-186f paper came out last week and we got a lot of press attention (lots more than I expected!). Tim Pyle and Robert Hurt at Caltch/JPL did an amazing job of of creating a beautiful image...
View ArticleBette Middler tweets our recent work
NASA announced the discovery of a dozen planets that could support life. DAMN! Just when I thought I was done booking “It’s the Girls” tour! — Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) January 12, 2015
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Exoplanet Travel Series Posters
The NASA Planetquest team have released three cool 50’s sci-fi style posters. One of them is for a planet from a paper Elisa Quintana and I recently put out called Kepler-186f. They also have posters...
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The first K2 multiplanet system
Ian Crossfield and collaborators posted a paper on arXiv earlier today announcing a system of three planets orbiting an M-dwarf star. These planets were found in data from Campaign 1 of the K2 Mission....
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Ten cool facts about the ancient Kepler-444 stellar system
A paper I worked on with Tiago Campante from the University of Birmingham and many others has just been published. It’s a truly astounding system. Here are 10 cools facts The star is 11.2 billion years...
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Kepler-37 from a backyard telescope
I was going through some old emails today and chanced upon one from Todd Klaus. Todd is now the software lead at Moon Express, an unbelievably cool company trying to send robotic missions to the moon....
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Timeline of Earth’s formation
For an upcoming paper I’m working on with my colleague Elisa Quintana I needed to make a illustrative diagram. I’ve never put a figure in a paper that isn’t a plot using data. I tried using a free...
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K2 Mission Observations of Neptune, Triton and Nereid
During Campaign 3 of the K2 Mission we observed Neptune at 1-min cadence for about 65 days. We made a movie of the motion and it’s really amazing. Jason Rowe has the best, most polished version but I’m...
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