Astro-Challenge: What’s so Special About 51 Pegasi?

It’s hard to imagine a time before we knew of worlds beyond our own solar system. These days, extra-solar (or “exoplanets”) are back page news, as discoveries occur almost daily.  But scant decades ago (Waaay back in the pre-Internet Stone Age of the early 1990’s) no exoplanets were known, and the entire field was open [...]

Review: Confessions of an Alien Hunter by Seth Shostak.

Seth Shostak has a unique tale of scientific inquiry to tell. At its heart are questions that some of the greatest thinkers of our time such as Jill Tarter and Carl Sagan have pondered; are we alone? Why are we here? How common or unique are we as a species?
Only very recently has the [...]

26.10.09:Seeing Starspots.

We know more about our Sun than any other star because it gives us the opportunity to study solar activity up close. But just how normal is it? Recently, astronomers have been able to spy activity on other suns, teasing the data out of exoplanet transits. These are planets that happen to cross the tiny [...]

19.10.09: 32 New Exoplanets Revealed!

Anybody notice the exoplanet tally on our front page hop up to 402 this morning? That’s because the European Southern Observatory (ESO) revealed a stunning 32 (count em!) new exoplanets identified this morning at their conference at Porto, Portugal. The discoveries were thanks to HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, a sensitive spectrograph [...]

02.10.09: A Small Observatory Helps with a Big Discovery.

When it comes to cutting edge astronomy, many think of lofty mountaintop behemoths, such as Keck, or the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. But how many of us think of… Gainesville, Florida? This article caught my eye this morning because its literally right in our backyard here at Astroguyz HQ in Hudson, Florida. As any would-be [...]

23.9.9 CoRoT-7b: A Rare Earth.

The “Super-Earths” are getting smaller. Recently, the ESA announced that an exoplanet discovered on February 3rd of this year by the CoRoT (Convection Rotation and planetary Transit) satellite is one of the lightest yet… at about five Earth masses, this transiting exoplanet is about twice the diameter of the Earth. But don’t pack your bags [...]

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