Personal

I am often asked to comment on what happened in Paris last December since I have both French and American citizenships and I live in the US. Like a lot of my compatriotes, it has been difficult to watch those events unfold on Friday afternoon December 13 (I was working at George Mason University in DC ). Since then, he has been also impossible to rationalize what really happened and to give a sense on those horrific events. Today I listened to "Geopolitique", a short program aired on France Inter which described events and their consequences in the geopolitical scale. Bernard Guetta summarized very well what are my thoughts on... read more ❯

In 2003, I was lucky enough to be part of a small group of astronomers that met at the University of California at Berkeley to brainstorm on an innovative idea: the design of an instrument to image and characterize planets around other stars, called exoplanets, using a telescope in the 8 – 10 meter class. A decade later, such an instrument became reality with the arrival of the Gemini Planet Imager (called also GPI, or “Gee-pie”) instrument at the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Five known planetary systems imaged with current adaptive optics systems. Fomalhaut shown on... read more ❯

If you need a break today, you should read this poem  by G. Landis published recently in the Starship Century Book. Truly inspiring!     Across the Dark, the Pioneers Geoffrey A. Landis The ships first sent across the dark ocean, pebbles flung into the universe vast, rocket-propelled, a flash of motion past Jupiter, Saturn, the Kuiper cloud: they glide outward to the stars now silent, dead, pitted by dust a voyage of a hundred thousand years: the Voyagers and Pioneers. The next probes sent out across the dark the swiftest ships yet made by man ion-engined craft, faster... read more ❯

It is amazing the amount of money and time wasted in 2012 on this "end of the world" prediction. We can blame ignorance of the people or sensationalism from the media, but we should also discuss the role of educated people, such as scientists, who have been spent time writing books & websites, answering interviews and debating on this non-sense. They promoted this myth until it was deemed a truth in the mind of people. This energy could have been spent to do something good for this world, something useful to make it... read more ❯

If you read this blog, I am certain that you are aware of the Venus Transit which occurred  from  22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012 to 04:49 UTC on 6 June (3:09pm to 8:49pm PDT). Because this astronomical event was visible from North America, Europe, and part of Africa & Asia, and it was streamed around the world from several observatories, it has been most likely one of the most observed and advertised astronomical phenomena, so I had to write a short personal post about it. A planetary transit occurred when a planetary target (here Venus) is passing in front of another one (here the Sun). An observer located on... read more ❯

Hello, everyone.  Welcome to my blog as part of the Cosmic Diary.  I'm an astronomer at the SETI Institute.  Or a planetary scientist.  Or a planetary astronomer.  Or something.  I've never figured out what to call myself.  I spend my days doing what most scientists do: converting raw data into published papers, hopefully figuring out some fundamental truth about the universe and advancing the scope of human knowledge along the way.  Or at least that's the theory.  Often my days are actually spent beating my head against... read more ❯

Some of you may have noticed that the Cosmic Diary Blog was unavailable over the past 2 weeks due to the migration of the Blog to the SETI Institute server. I am happy to announce that thanks to the great effort of our IT team (Special thanks to J. Brewster!), the blog is now back and will soon expand with new bloggers. We have been planning for a while to make this major change but we had to postpone it due to lack of time and clear knowledge on the Wordpress server. But it is now done, and it is very... read more ❯