Category: exo-planets

exo-planets

March 19, 2013

Progress on the GPI exoplanet imager integration

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a next generation adaptive optics instrument being built for the Gemini Observatory. This is an ambitious project with the goal of directly imaging extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars. The instrument is currently being integrated at ...

January 17, 2013

Kepler is Sick and Resting: “Mountain View, we have a problem”

"Mountain View, we have a problem..." NASA Kepler Manager at NASA Ames, Mountain View announced today that they interrupted the science operation of the spacecraft, due an issue with one of the reaction wheels.  Kepler is equipped with four reaction wheels ...

May 2, 2012

A Snapshot of Exoplanet Study

The study of exoplanets is without any doubt the most active and disrupting field in today astronomy. I had often blogged about it since it is my little obsession. Unfortunately, I have a hard time to keep up with the ...

September 15, 2011

Kepler-16: Exoplanets around binary star systems DO exist

Kepler-16 is another great discovery coming from the Kepler telescope, the 10th NASA Discovery mission which is devoted to finding Earth-size exoplanets by monitoring variations of brightness due to transit. Today the Kepler team found a circumbinary exoplanet, an exoplanet ...

February 2, 2011

A landslide of Kepler Exoplanet Candidates

There will be a before and after Kepler Era in astronomy. Today, with the release of 1,202 exoplanet candidates from data collected with the Kepler spacecraft over 140 days of observation, we have just entered in a new age of ...

January 10, 2011

Kepler-10b – The first unambiguous rocky exoplanet

It is done. The Kepler team finally announced the discovery of its first terrestrial exoplanet. A referred journal, accepted in the Astrophysical journal (here) by Natalie Batalha and a large number of colleagues, describes this new member of the ...

August 24, 2010

Discovery of 7 exoplanets around a Sun-like star

Today, a team of astronomers from Europe led by group of the Observatoire de Geneve announced the discovery of SEVEN exoplanets around a southern hemisphere star called HD 10180.  Even if the name of the star is far from being memorable, ...

August 9, 2010

FIRST@LICK: Getting ready for the first night

After a complicated mounting of the instrument on the telescope, we spent the entire first 2 days and a large part of the beginning of the night, reinstalling and realigning the FIRST instrument. JUly 23 and July 24 were  busy ...

April 16, 2010

Corot-9b: Did COROT discover a Pandora-like world?

Hello, I was in Europe last month to attend a workshop on asteroid size and shape and also to visit my colleagues at the observatoire de Paris. It was a very useful trip and the timing was perfect since the COROT ...

January 14, 2010

Five exoplanets discovered by Kepler – a discussion and a movie

I mentioned on this blog on several occasions (see "the first light") the Kepler mission which aims at detecting exoplanets through the transit method (a.k.a the small attenuation of light due to the passage of the exoplanet between us and ...