Preliminary results from a survey conducted to gauge how the general public thinks about astronomy and astrophysics and the scientists who specialize in the field.
A new survey investigates social perceptions of astronomy and our sister site Chembites has an article about the grad school application process.
Morganson et al. announce the discovery of the first quasar discovered by Pan-STARRS. The newly detected quasar is a Broad Absorption Line quasar at a redshift of 5.73 +/- 0.02 with a z band magnitude of 19.4, a luminosity of 3.8×1047 erg/s, and an estimated black hole mass of 6.9×109 solar masses.
Wolfgang & Laughlin combine observations from the HARPS radial velocity survey and the Kepler transit survey to investigate the mass-radius-period distribution of exoplanets. They find that most small planets are rocky.
Kepler has discovered a real-life version of Tatooine! The newly minted planet, dubbed Kepler-16b, orbits both stars on a 229 day orbit and is roughly the same size as Saturn.
How do the planet candidates discovered by Kepler compare to the planets detected by radial velocity surveys? Can we combine the Kepler radii with the RV masses to determine whether small planets are rocky Super-Earths or gaseous mini-Neptunes?