During my visit to the Paris Observatory earlier this summer, Alain Lecavelier showed me the work that he and David Sing and their collaborators have been doing to get a better handle on the atmospheric conditions on HD 209458b. Using … Continue reading
In 1999, the sun-like star HD 209458 was discovered to harbor a transiting planet on a 3.52 day orbit. This was a big deal. The recurring occultations permitted, for the first time, an accurate measurement of both the radius and … Continue reading
Image Source Two decades ago, a brisk list of a hundred-odd alien worlds comprised the entirety of the extrasolar planet census. HD 209458b, along with a faintly dubious handful of OGLE objects, were the only exoplanets known to transit, and … Continue reading
The radii of the transiting extrasolar planets have been the source of a lot of consternation. It’s very hard to tell the mass of a planet simply by looking at how large it is. In our own solar system, there’s … Continue reading
It’s been rather arduous past few days as the HST Cycle-18 proposal deadline — 5 PM PST, Friday Feb. 26th, to be exact — bore down like a freight train. During the past year, I’ve become quite intrigued by the … Continue reading
A recent article in Nature reports that WASP-18b has emerged victorious in the ongoing exoplanetary limbo competition. WASP-18b is also a strong contender in the least-habitable-planet-yet-detected competition. It has a mass roughly ten times Jupiter’s and skims 2.6 stellar radii … Continue reading
Turn your world upside-down and you’re looking at a very different planet. Antarctica, ringed by the vast exapse of the Southern Ocean, draws all the attention. Viewed from beneath, I think Earth might better resemble the habitable planets that are … Continue reading
Earth occulting the Sun, seen from Apollo 12 (source). The year 1995 fades into increasingly ancient history, but I vividly remember the excitement surrounding Mayor and Queloz’s Nature article describing the discovery of 51 Peg b. Back in the day, … Continue reading
Image Source. My colleague Garth Illingworth, who is well connected to the Space Telescope Science Institute, sent an e-mail to the UCSC Department this morning that details the ongoing repair and refurbishment of the Hubble Space Telescope. HST repair day … Continue reading
I like it when remarkable exoplanet results are disguised within more-or-less innocuously titled papers. A nice example occurred this summer, with “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets. XIII. A planetary system with 3 Super-Earths (4.2, 6.9, & 9.2 Earth … Continue reading