Gravitational lensing is a technique rich enough to help us study not only distant galaxies but exoplanets around stars in our own Milky Way. As gravity warps space and time, light passing near a massive object takes the shortest route, from our perspective seeming to be bent by the gravitational field. Inside the Milky Way, such effects are referred to as 'microlensing,' capable of magnifying the light of a more distant object and sometimes revealing the presence of an unseen planet around the intervening star. Now we have a Kepler find with implications for binary stars. Working with Eric Agol at the University of Washington, graduate student Ethan Kruse has discovered a 'self-lensing' white dwarf eclipsing binary system. He made the find while looking for transits in the Kepler data, the signatures of planets crossing in front of their stars as seen from Earth. KOI-3278 turned out to have an unusual signal, says Kruse: "I found what essentially looked like an upside-down planet....

Last week's announcement about Kepler-186f presented a world that is evidently in the outer reaches of its star's habitable zone, with the usual caveats that we know all too little about this place to draw any conclusions about what is actually on its surface. Is it rocky, and does it have liquid water? Perhaps, but as Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) points out on his systemic site, the widely circulated image of Kepler-186f was all but photographic in its clarity. Listen to Laughlin as he looks at the image: I stared at it for a long time, tracing the outlines of the oceans and the continents, surface detail vivid in the mind's eye. Yes, ice sheets hold the northern regions of Kepler-186f in an iron, frigid grip, but in the sunny equatorial archipelago, concerns of global warming are far away. Waves lap halcyon shores drenched in light like liquid gold. He goes on to look at how the press has handled earlier stories on habitable planets, dating back to the Gliese 581c frenzy of 2007....

Gravitational microlensing is a phenomenally interesting way to find unusual things in the cosmos. A closer star can bend space around itself enough that, when it passes between us and a more distant star, a distinct brightening of the distant star's light is apparent, a lens effect. That's a useful phenomenon in its own right, and gravitational lensing involving distant galaxies is a significant part of some astronomers' toolkits. But we can also use the effect when looking for exoplanets, and in the case of recent work, even a candidate for an exoplanet's moon. The method works in this context because if the foreground star has a planet orbiting it, a second lensing event can occur, and a comparison between the two brightening events can help us figure out the relative mass of the two objects. The problem with microlensing is that these are one-shot events, dependent on chance celestial alignments. In other words, we can't go back and study them a second time. That's a shame,...

When it comes to habitable planets, we focus naturally enough on stars like our own. But increasing attention has been paid to stars smaller and cooler than the Sun. M-class dwarfs have small but interesting habitable zones of their own and certain advantages when it comes to detecting terrestrial planets. K-class stars are also interesting, with a prominent candidate, Alpha Centauri B, existing in our stellar back yard. What we haven't examined with the same intensity, though, are stars a bit more massive and hotter than the Sun, and new work suggests that this is a mistake. Manfred Cuntz (University of Texas at Arlington), working with grad student Satoko Sato, has been leading work on F-class stars of the kind normally thought problematic for life because of their high levels of ultraviolet radiation. Along with researchers from the University of Guanajuato (Mexico), Cuntz and Sato suggest that we take a closer look at F stars, particularly considering that they offer a wider...