News about a nearby brown dwarf occupies us this morning, but first, a quick site update. The recent server problems did not, fortunately, result in the loss of any data, but I've had to make some temporary software changes to get Centauri Dreams back up. Expect more changes in coming weeks as I replace these fixes, so you may see things in transition for a time, but the server switchover is complete. One remaining problem is a snafu in image uploads that I hope to fix soon. Now, to brown dwarfs. Seeing them is tricky business. Too small to be stars (although they do fuse deuterium), too massive to be planets, they're hard to pick out in visible light and are generally detected at infrared wavelengths. Now a faint brown dwarf orbiting the nearby star Wolf 940 has been discovered. The primary is a red dwarf some 40 light years from Earth, orbited by its dim neighbor at a distance of some 440 AU. This may bring to mind our recent discussion of Lorenzo Iorio's work, which settled on a...

'First light' from any new telescope is an exciting moment, but never more so than with the Kepler instrument. Dust cover off, the space-based telescope is now looking at its target, a starfield in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way. Kepler's full field of view covers a 100-degree swath of sky, containing scenery like NGC 6791, an eight-billion year old cluster some 13,000 light years from us, as seen in the image below. Image: The area pictured is 0.2 percent of Kepler's full field of view, and shows hundreds of stars in the constellation Lyra. The image has been color-coded so that brighter stars appear white, and fainter stars, red. It is a 60-second exposure, taken on April 8, 2009, one day after the spacecraft's dust cover was jettisoned. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Loosely bound, the stars in NGC 6791 have begun to spread out from each other, the signature of what is called an 'open cluster.' The view is impressive but also blurry, an intentional effect that is being used,...

Kepler's dust cover has now been jettisoned, meaning the search for extrasolar 'Earths' is not long from commencing. The cover stayed in place for so long because the spacecraft's photometer had to make measurements of electronic noise that will later have to be removed from the science data. Mission engineers will now continue with the calibration process for several weeks using images of actual stars. Our debates over the 'rare Earth' hypothesis will be getting firm data in short order because of Kepler. Three years from now, having had time to detect terrestrial-class planets in the habitable zone of their stars, confirm the detections and further examine the results, we should have at least a sense of how common such planets are. Finally we can move beyond informed speculation with the sort of hard data we need. And as far as the first terrestrial planet detection in the habitable zone, CoRoT may just beat Kepler to the punch. Meanwhile, the astrobiological side of the 'rare...

Depressing economic times inevitably cast a pall over our space plans. That makes it important to keep our eyes on the big picture -- what we hope to accomplish -- rather than succumbing to the fatigue induced by seeing good science pushed back on the calendar year after year. Will we get a terrestrial planet finder off in the next fifteen years? Will we get back to the Jupiter system some time before 2030? I don't know, but times like these require persistence, patience, and continued hard thinking. I was musing about this while looking through a paper Dave Moore passed along recently. It's a discussion of where we need to go now that we've got missions like CoRoT and Kepler in space and the James Webb Space Telescope in the picture for 2014. Tom Greene (NASA Ames) and colleagues from various institutions are looking at a space telescope with relatively modest aperture in the 1.4-meter range, one that would use a coronagraph to block the light of central stars to allow direct...