January 2010

Glints of light off oceans or ice caps would be useful indeed as we try to figure out what we’re seeing on a distant terrestrial world. One day we’ll have the kind of instrumentation that can make direct observations of a planet like this, separating its light from that of its star. A ‘terrestrial planet [...]

With the American Astronomical Society meeting now wrapped up in Washington, we’re left to mull over the highlights, particularly the Kepler results. But the Keck Observatory also contributed compelling exoplanet news in the form of HD156668b, a planet some eighty light years from earth in the direction of Hercules. Working with Keck data, a research [...]

William Borucki’s talk about the early Kepler findings on Monday created the biggest spike in traffic I’ve ever seen on Centauri Dreams, enough to blow through our memory allocation and crash the site for about twenty minutes. I had to reboot the server and up the memory to get back online, a tribute to the [...]