When the Extreme Precision Spectrograph (EXPRES) is commissioned in Flagstaff, Arizona, in late 2017, it will be the culmination of years of dedicated effort by a team of Yale astronomers and statisticians—and the beginning of a new era in the burgeoning field of exoplanet detection. (more…)
Washington, D.C. — NASA’s Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun. A team of researchers, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered what could be a large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, comparable to a comfortable spring day on Earth. This landmark finding will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery team, led by William Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars. Earth-size planets whose orbital planes are aligned such that they periodically pass in front of their stars result in tiny dimmings of their host star’s light–dimmings that can only be measured by a highly specialized space telescope like Kepler. (more…)
