The third Extreme Solar System conference was held between Nov 29 to Dec 4th, in Kona, Hawaii, on the 20th anniversary of the first exoplanet detection around a main sequence star. This astrobite gives a brief overview of the conference.
Spirou often runs into fantastic adventures with his courageous, and sharp pet squirrel Spip. Their next adventure: a radial velocity spectrograph. What sophisticated technology is this? How does it work? What can it help us find?
There are more moons than planets in our Solar System that harbor liquid water, and these moons may offer us the best chances of finding life off of Earth. Today’s paper takes the search for habitable moons a step further by investigating how telescopes of the near future might allow us to see and characterize these moons around exoplanets.
Do you own a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera? The authors of today’s paper do. They used it for astronomy. They used it for science.
Our current best radial velocities are precise to about 1m/s. How do we make the step towards achieving 10cm/s precision?
Recently we have been finding some crazy uses for these unmanned machines. Could investigating the universe be one of them?