Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

My solar system chauvinism is well-established, but I am as much a sucker for beautiful astrophotos as the rest of you. Once in a while I get a media advisory from the European Southern Observatory about a new pretty picture posted on their website, and then I inevitably lose an hour following links to one stunner after another.

Jason Davis

Taking a closer look at KOI 172.02, a super-Earth exoplanet sitting in its solar system's habitable zone.

Casey Dreier

Join Casey Dreier and Emily Lakdawalla as they are joined by Dr. Meg Schwamb from Yale University. They will discuss the latest announcements from the American Astronomical Society 2013 conference and Dr. Schwamb's research in outer solar system bodies.

Emily Lakdawalla

This year's American Astronomical Society meeting featured tons and tons of news on exoplanets. They're everywhere! And not just planets, but also asteroids, comets, and more....

Martin Still

A change in the Kepler data delivery process provides both scientists and the public to get involved in planet discovery.

Emily Lakdawalla

A recently launched Earth-observing satellite is using the stars to practice its pointing, and caught a neat animation of Jupiter.

Jason Davis

Scientists would like your help starting at high-resolution images of the Andromeda Galaxy captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Jason Davis

Two short videos produced by Jason Davis on astronomy and planetary science work taking place at the University of Arizona.

Bruce Betts

European astronomers have made the first planetary discovery in the closest-to-Earth Alpha Centauri star system. Here is some information about the discovery, and insights from Yale Astronomer Debra Fischer, who leads another Alpha Centauri planet search partially supported by The Planetary Society.

Emily Lakdawalla

In the first full day of the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, I listened to scientific sessions on icy worlds and on an exoplanet in a four-star system.

Mat Kaplan

The newly-released eXtreme Deep Field takes us even further back into the history of our universe than the Ultra Deep Field or UDF.

Mat Kaplan

Okay, just the ones we know about. xkcd does it again.

Emily Lakdawalla

A measurement of the Andromeda galaxy's proper motion shows it's coming directly at us, and will collide with the Milky Way in 4 billion years. The event will transform the appearance of our night sky.

Bruce Betts

Do planets circle our closest stellar neighbors, the system loved by science fiction: Alpha Centauri? We don’t know. But, Debra Fischer, Julien Spronck, and their colleagues at Yale University, in part with Planetary Society support, are trying to find out.

Emily Lakdawalla

Someone on Twitter pointed me to a paper recently posted to ArXiv titled

Emily Lakdawalla

There is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cary and Michael Huang present a basic

Jason Davis

The NuSTAR X-ray telescope will enable scientists to get a much-improved look at black holes and supernovae in both the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Emily Lakdawalla

This week's lineup is a largely astronomical crowd so most of the conversation concerned dark matter and boiling exoplanets and imaging the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Emily Lakdawalla

A large team of researchers has announced in a Nature article the discovery of not one, but two, Earth-sized planets orbiting a star named Kepler-20. This article separates the observational facts from the quite-likely-to-be-true inferences from the downstream speculations.