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10 July 2009
Solar System Creator
As I mentioned last month, on top of research and grad school duties, I’m in the process of planning out a sci-fi novel. It began with the month-long outlining challenge “Midsommer Madness” over at the Liberty Hall writing site, and I am continuing with it in my spare time. I am trying to make my novel grounded in reality whenever possible. It is set in a known star system, 55 …
8 June 2009
Carnival of Space #106
Hello folks, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been keeping busy trying to write up a draft of a paper on the Gale crater landing site for MSL, which is taking a very long time and becoming very large. I don’t anticipate having lots of time to post here this month. Even as I work on the draft, I will be traveling out to Los Alamos National …
26 April 2009
Discoveries in Planetary Science
The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society just released several short sets of slides summarizing recent important discoveries in planetary science that aren’t yet in textbooks. They are very nice, easy to understand summaries so I encourage you to check them out. The topics so far are: Mars Methane, Extrasolar Planet Imaging, The Chaotic Early Solar System, Mars Sulfur Chemistry, and Mercury Volcanism. Follow those links to …
28 March 2009
LPSC: The Masursky Lecture
Every year at LPSC one of the big events is the Masursky lecture, given by that year’s winner of the Masursky prize recognizing “individuals who have rendered outstanding service to planetary science and exploration through engineering, managerial, programmatic, or public service activities”. This year’s winner was Alan Stern, and he gave a thought-provoking talk about everyone’s favorite subject: What is a Planet? The official title was “Planet Categorization and Planetary …
25 February 2009
A Tidally Locked Earth
A while ago, I posted about an interesting abstract and poster at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference discussion the possibility that tidally locked exoplanets might still be habitable. Well, apparently the new Discovery series entitled “The World Without…” is doing an episode about what would happen if the Earth stopped rotating. One of their associate producers contacted me after reading my blog post about tidally locked exoplanets and asked …
18 November 2008
Mike Brown on Planet Images
Mike Brown (planet hunter extraordinaire) has a really interesting and thoughtful post on his blog about his reaction to the announcement that planets around other stars had been imaged. He details the process that he goes through when reading a paper and then preparing to speak to the press about it. Here’s the excellent quote that he gave to a reporter asking about the discovery: I can’t say the pictures …
13 November 2008
Extrasolar Planets Imaged by Hubble and Gemini!
There was a big announcement today: the Hubble space telescope has taken an image of a planet orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut! And not only that, the Gemini telescope has taken an image of TWO planets orbiting the star HR8799! Phil Plait has a nice and very excited post about this over at bad astronomy. You can also go straight to the source and read the JPL press release. I’ll …
14 October 2008
DPS 2008 Day Three: More Titan, More Exoplanets
This morning I spent my time in the Titan Subsurface and Interior sessions, and I’m glad I did because there were some cool talks. There were a couple that showed possible evidence for cryovolcanism (that is, “volcanoes” where the “lava” is actually water freezing to become ice). One talk by Rosaly Lopes showed radar images of locations called Hotei Arcus and Western Xanadu, and suggested that the lobate features that …
11 October 2008
DPS 2008 Day One: Mars, Exoplanets, Defining Planets and Enceladus
Today was the first day of the Division for Planetary Sciences conference here at Cornell. All the talks are being live web-streamed, but since most of you probably don’t have time to sit and watch esoteric scientific talks online all weekend, here are the highlights from the sessions I saw today. In the morning, the first session that I went to was Mars Surface and Surface/Atmosphere Interactions. DPS is an …
15 September 2008
First image of another planet around a sun-like star!
Check it out – this is probably the first image of an extra solar planet around a Sun-like star! More specifically, the image above shows both the primary and companion of the star 1RXSJ160929.1-210524 (romantic, eh?), imaged at the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The companion is about 8 times the mass of Jupiter, and has a radius about 17% of the Sun’s. One of the reasons …
