The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the exoplanet orbiting the star Formalhaut that was supposedly imaged and then later theorized to be nothing more than a dust cloud might be a planet after all.
False alarm: The rock found on Sunday is not part of the meteor that fell over San Francisco last week.
The first mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope has been completed.
This is the first of seven. It is also the largest single mirror ever polished, at 8.4 meters, or 27.5 feet across. When completed the GMT’s segmented mirror will be 25 meters across, or more than 82 feet.
The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is about to get a snack.
Update: The recently launched NuStar telescope in July detected its first flare from the central black hole (which by the way is called Sagittarius A* and is pronounced Sagittarius A-star). If the gas cloud produces any fireworks as it whips past the black hole in the coming year then NuStar should see it.
The first piece of a meteor that fell over San Francisco on Wednesday has been found.
The 2.2-ounce meteorite hit the roof of Rev. Kent and Lisa Webber on St. Francis Avenue on Thursday night, but they didn’t realize at the time what it was, according to Novato Patch.
Astronomers now have the technology to observe Io’s volcanoes erupt, from Earth.
More exoplanet news: The problems of Kepler.
The article outlines the status — both good and bad — of Kepler in its hunt for Earthlike exoplanets.
I have already reported on Kepler’s failed reaction wheel. It no longer has a backup and needs every reaction wheel it has to keep it pointed in so precise a manner. Thus, the loss of one more wheel will shut the telescope down.
However, I had not been aware that the scientists now need more than twice as much time, eight years instead of three, to do their work, because they have discovered that sunlike stars are far more variable than expected. To quote the article,
» Read more
Big news: Astronomers have discovered that the nearest star to the Earth, Alpha Centauri, has an exoplanet only slightly heavier than the Earth.
Alpha Centauri is actually a triple star system, with two sunlike stars in a tight orbit around each other and a third star far out orbiting them both. The exoplanet orbits one of the inner stars every 3.2 days.
More details from Nature here.
A review of the extraterrestrial solar systems found by Kepler shows that most are like our own, “flatter than pancakes.”
A planet with four suns, found by amateurs.
A super Earth, made of diamonds.
Astronomers also thought 55 Cancri e contained a substantial amount of super-heated water, based on the assumption that its chemical makeup was similar to Earth’s, Madhusudhan said. But the new research suggests the planet has no water at all, and appears to be composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and, possibly, some silicates. The study estimates that at least a third of the planet’s mass — the equivalent of about three Earth masses — could be diamond. “By contrast, Earth’s interior is rich in oxygen, but extremely poor in carbon — less than a part in thousand by mass,” says co-author and Yale geophysicist Kanani Lee.
