What’s a movie director supposed to do about gravity? In The Martian, we see Matt Damon moving about on Mars with a gait more or less similar to what he would use on Earth, despite Mars’ 0.38g. Harrison Ford changes worlds but never strides in The Force Awakens. About the gravitational challenges of 1953’s Cat Women of the Moon, the less said the better. Even so, we can chalk all these problems up to the fact that both top directors and their B-film counterparts are forced to film at the bottom of a gravity well, so a certain suspension of disbelief is at least understandable. But assuming that gravity invariably increases as planets get bigger can be misleading, as Fernando J. Ballesteros (Universitat de València) and Bartolo Luque (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) demonstrate in a new paper in Astrobiology. We learn that some larger worlds in our own Solar System have gravity not all that different from the Earth. In fact, the surface gravities for Venus, Uranus, Neptune and...

If you look into the software that made possible yesterday's exoplanet results, you'll find that VESPA (Validation of Exoplanet Signals using a Probabilistic Algorithm) is freely available online. The work of Princeton's Timothy Morton, who spoke at the announcement news conference, VESPA is all about calculating the probabilities of false positives for signals that look like transiting planets. Transits, of course, are what the Kepler space telescope has been about, catching the slight stellar dimming as a planet crosses across the face of a star. The numbers quickly get mind-boggling because while Natalie Batalha (NASA Ames), joined by Morton, NASA's Paul Hertz and Kepler/K2 mission manager Charlie Sobeck (a colleague of Batalha at Ames) could point to 1284 newly confirmed exoplanets, they represent only a fraction of what must be in the Kepler field of view. Out of its over 150,000 stars, Kepler can only see the planets that transit their host stars, making this a problem of...

About forty light years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius is the star designated 2MASS J23062928-0502285, which as of today qualifies as perhaps the most interesting ultracool dwarf we've yet found. What we learn in a new paper in Nature is that the star, also known as TRAPPIST-1 after the European Southern Observatory's TRAPPIST telescope at La Silla, is orbited by three planets that are roughly the size of the Earth. We may have a world of astrobiological interest -- and conceivably several -- orbiting this tiny, faint star. Image: Comparison between the Sun and the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. Credit: ESO. If we untangle the TRAPPIST acronym, we find that it refers not to an order of monks (famous for their beers) but to the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, a 60 cm robotic instrument that is operated from a control room in Liège, Belgium. TRAPPIST homes in on sixty nearby dwarf stars at infrared wavelengths to search for planets. Michaël...

The star YLW 16B, about 400 light years from the Earth, has roughly the same mass as the Sun. But unlike the Sun, a mature 4.6 billion year old star, YLW 16B is a scant million years old, a variable of the class known as T Tauri stars. Whereas our star is relatively stable in terms of radiation emission, the younger star shows readily detectable changes in radiation, a fact that astronomers have now used in combining data from the Spitzer space telescope with four ground-based instruments to learn more about the dimensions of its protoplanetary disk. Image: This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Material from the thick disk flows along the star's magnetic field lines and is deposited onto the star's surface. When material hits the star, it lights up brightly. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. The method is called photo reverberation, and it takes advantage of the fact that when the star brightens as material from the turbulent disk falls onto its surface, some of...

At Palo Alto's superb Amber India, I was thinking about Alpha Centauri. There are several Amber India locations in the Bay area, but the Palo Alto restaurant dishes up, among other delights, a spicy scallop appetizer that is searingly hot and brilliantly spiced. Greg and Jim Benford were at the table, Claudio Maccone and my son Miles. It was the night before Breakthrough Discuss convened. And while the topics roamed over many aspects of spaceflight, it was that star system right here in our solar neighborhood that preoccupied me. How lucky could we be to have not one but two stars this close and so similar to our own? Centauri A is a G-class star, Centauri B a K, and if we hit the jackpot, we could conceivably find planets orbiting both. Then there is Proxima Centauri, an M-dwarf that is the closest star of all to the Solar System. The presence of so many astronomers on the Breakthrough Discuss roster made it clear we'd get the latest on the hunt for planets here, a vital factor as...