In astronomy everyone shares the same laboratory, the sky. Astronomers with Ph.Ds use giant telescopes to look at the same sky you can walk outside and look up to. Many amateur astronomers have taken advantage of just that….
Sukrit and I just got back from the Saas-Fee astrobiology course. We learned about deep-sea life, the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, the search for life on Titan, and more.
In 2006 Hsieh & Jewitt published the discovery of several main belt asteroids observed to have tails (just like comets do), which activate when nearest the Sun (just like comets do). In this paper, Licandro et al. test the origins of two so-called “main belt comets” by looking at spectra.
Meteorology of other planets in our solar system provides critical laboratories for testing our climate models, studying new weather mechanisms, and developing climate theories for other worlds. This particular paper discusses a method for identifying carbon dioxide clouds on Mars using infrared spectroscopy.