We haven't had many examples of so-called 'hot Mercury' planets to work with, or in this case, what might be termed a 'hot super-Mercury' because of its size. For HD 137496 b actually fits the 'super-Earth' category, at roughly 30 percent larger in radius than the Earth. What makes it stand out, of course, is the fact that as a 'Mercury,' it is primarily made up of iron, with its core carrying over 70 percent of the planet's mass. It's also a scorched world, with an orbital radius of 0.027 AU and a period of 1.6 days. Another planet, non-transiting, turns up at HD 137496 as well. It's a 'cold Jupiter' with a minimum mass calculated at 7.66 Jupiter masses, an eccentric orbit of 480 days, and an orbital distance of 1.21 AU from the host star. HD 137496 c is thus representative of the Jupiter-class worlds we'll be finding more of as our detection methods are fine-tuned for planets on longer, slower orbits than the 'hot Jupiters' that were so useful in the early days of radial velocity...

Centauri Dreams readers will remember Billy Quarles’ name in connection with a 2019 paper on Alpha Centauri A and B, which examined not just those stars but binary systems in general in terms of obliquity -- axial tilt -- on potential planets as affected by the gravitational effects of their systems. The news for habitability around Centauri B wasn’t good. Whereas the Moon helps to stabilize Earth’s axial tilt, the opposite occurs on a simulated Centauri B planet. And without a large moon, gravitational forcing from the secondary star still causes extreme obliquity variations. Orbital precession induced by the companion star is the problem, and it may be that Centauri A and B are simply too close together, whereas more widely separated binaries are less disruptive. I’ll send you to the paper for more (citation below), but you can get an overview with Axial Tilt, Habitability, and Centauri B. It’s exciting to think that our ongoing investigations of Centauri A and B will, one of these...

ESPRESSO comes through. The spectrograph, mounted on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, has produced data allowing astronomers to calculate the mass of the lightest exoplanet ever measured using radial velocity techniques. The star is L 98-59, an M-dwarf about a third of the mass of the Sun some 35 light years away in the southern constellation Volans. It was already known to host three planets in tight orbits of 2.25 days, 3.7 days and 7.5 days. The innermost world, L 98-59b, has now been determined to have roughly half the mass of Venus. What extraordinary precision from ESPRESSO (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations). The three previously known L 98-59 planets were discovered in data from TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which spots dips in the lightcurve from a star when a planet crosses its face. Adding ESPRESSO's data, and incorporating previous data from HARPS, has allowed Olivier Demangeon...

There is a public YouTube channel for watching the Breakthrough Discuss meetings, which began today and extend through tomorrow. Click here to go to sessions on "The Alpha Centauri System: A Beckoning Neighbor." I'll have thoughts on some of these presentations in coming weeks.

The news that NASA will extend the InSight mission on Mars for two years, taking it through December of 2022, is not surprising, given the data trove the mission team has collected through operation of the mission seismometer. A live asset on Mars also deepens our knowledge of the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, all reasons enough for pushing for another two years. But the extension of the Juno mission to Jupiter deserves more attention than it's getting, given that Juno's remit will be expanded deep into the Jovian system. Image: NASA has extended both the Juno mission at Jupiter through September 2025 and the InSight mission at Mars through December 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. For those of us fascinated with the outer system, this is good news indeed. I'm looking over two documents, the first being a presentation based on a report submitted to NASA' Outer Planets Assessment Group (thanks to Ashley Baldwin for passing this along). The OPAG document was produced by Scott...

Henry Cordova, whose recent critique of traditional SETI kicked off a lengthy discussion in these pages, has been mulling over issues of habitability in the galaxy's vast population of red dwarf stars. While we've focused on the questions raised by stellar flare activity and the climate challenges of tidal lock, the narrow band of habitability among the fainter M-dwarfs poses its own problems. How big a factor is a narrow circumstellar habitable zone? Henry comes by his interest in these matters by way of US Navy training in both astronomy and mathematics. A retired geographer and map maker now living in southeastern Florida, he's keeping up with exoplanetary issues as an active amateur astronomer and collector of star atlases. by Henry Cordova I am curious as to how the width of a star's habitable zone varies with respect to its luminosity. It would not be unreasonable to assume that the surface temperature of a planet is directly related to the radiant flux of its star....

Alex Tolley's essay on using beaming technology to reach the solar gravity focus (SGF) caught the eye of Jim Benford, who has been exploring the prospects for beamed sails for many years. Along with brother Greg, Jim did laboratory work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory some 20 years ago to demonstrate the method, and in the years since has written extensively on the uses of beaming within the Solar System as well as on interstellar trajectories. But what kind of beam are we talking about? Benford, a plasma physicist and CEO of Microwave Sciences, has done recent work on a gravitational focus mission in connection with Breakthrough Starshot. He points to the maturity of microwave technology and the cost savings involved in using microwaves for a mission far faster than anything that has yet flown. by James Benford An intermediate destination for beamed energy interstellar probes, such as Starshot, is the Sun's Inner Gravitational Focus (SGF). Alex Tolley suggests using Beamer...

I want to send along best wishes for the season to all of you. Centauri Dreams started as a book and became a study guide for me as I tried to keep up with ongoing developments in deep space research. But turning the site into a community, which I did in 2005 by adding comments, has been what really made it go, as I've continued to learn from the discussions between readers, finding new resources and different insights I would never have achieved on my own. So thank all of you for this continuing gift, and may this holiday season be the prelude to great discoveries ahead.

Seeing oceans, continents and seasonal changes on an exoplanet pushes conventional optical instruments well beyond their limits, which is why NASA is exploring the Sun's gravitational lens as a mission target in what is now the third phase of a study at NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts). All of this builds upon the impressive achievements of Claudio Maccone that we've recently discussed. Led by Slava Turyshev, the NIAC effort takes advantage of light amplification of 1011 and angular resolutions that dwarf what the largest instruments in our catalog can deliver, showing what the right kind of space mission can do. We're going to track the Phase III work with great interest, but let's look back at what the earlier studies have accomplished along the way. Specifically, I'm interested in mission architectures, even as the NASA effort at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory continues to consider the issues surrounding untangling an optical image from the Einstein ring around the Sun....

Red dwarf stars have fascinated me for decades, ever since I learned that a potentially habitable planet around one might well be tidally locked. Trying to imagine a living world with a sun that didn’t move in the sky was the kind of exercise that I love about science fiction, where playing with ideas always includes a vivid visual element. What kind of landscapes would a place like this offer to the view? What kind of weather would tidal lock conjure? Stephen Baxter’s novel Proxima (Ace, 2014) is a wonderful exercise in such world-building. Thus my continuing interest in the splendid work being done by RedDots, which takes as its charter the detection of terrestrial planets orbiting red dwarfs near the Sun. You’ll recall that this is the team that discovered Proxima Centauri b, a star under increased scrutiny of late as other potential planetary signals are examined. RedDots also gave us Barnard’s Star b and has found three planets around the red dwarf GJ 1061. Now we learn about a...

Somehow it feels as if the Hubble Space Telescope has been with us longer than the 30 years now being celebrated. But it was, in fact, on April 24, 1990 that the instrument was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery, being deployed the following day. 1.4 million observations have followed, with data used to write more than 17,000 peer-reviewed papers. It's safe to say that Hubble's legacy will involve decades of research going forward as its archives are tapped by future researchers. That's good reason to celebrate with a 30th anniversary image. I'm reminded that the recent work we looked at on the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov involved Hubble as part of the effort that detected the highest levels of carbon monoxide ever seen in a comet so close to the Sun. Using Hubble data is simply a given wherever feasible. And given yesterday's article on star formation and conditions in the Sun's birth cluster that may have produced leftover material from other stellar systems still...

Learning about the orbital tilt of a distant exoplanet may help us understand how young planets evolve, and especially how they interact with both their star and other nearby planets. Thus the question of ‘hot Neptunes’ and the mechanisms that put them in place.The issue has been under study since 2004. Are we looking at planets laden with frozen ices that have somehow migrated to the inner system, or are these worlds that formed in place, so that their heavy elements are highly refractory materials that can withstand high disk temperatures? Among the exoplanets that can give us guidance here is DS Tuc Ab, discovered in 2019 in data from the TESS mission (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). Here we have a young world whose host is conveniently part of the 45 million year old Tucana-Horologium moving group (allowing us to establish its age), a planet within a binary system in the constellation Tucana. The binary stars are a G-class and K-class star, with DS Tuc Ab orbiting the...

Keith Cooper is a familiar face on Centauri Dreams, both through his own essays and the dialogues he and I have engaged in on interstellar topics. Keith is the editor of Astronomy Now and the author of both The Contact Paradox: Challenging Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Bloomsbury Sigma), and Origins of the Universe: The Cosmic Microwave Background and the Search for Quantum Gravity (Icon Books) to be published later this year. The Contact Paradox is a richly detailed examination of the history and core concepts of SETI, inspiring a new set of conversations, of which this is the first. With the recent expansion of the search through Breakthrough Listen, where does SETI stand both in terms of its likelihood of success and its perception among the general public? Paul Gilster Keith, we're 60 years into SETI and no contact yet, though there are a few tantalizing things like the WOW! signal to hold our attention. Given that you have just given us an...

Mention red dwarf habitable zones and tidal lock invariably comes up. If a planet is close enough to a dim red star to maintain temperatures suitable for life, wouldn't it keep one face turned toward it in perpetuity? But tidal lock, as Ashley Baldwin explains in the essay below, is more complex than we sometimes realize. And while there are ways to produce temperate climate models for such planets, tidal lock itself is a factor in not just M-dwarfs, but K- and even G-class stars like the Sun. Flip a few starting conditions and Earth itself might have been in tidal lock. The indefatigable Dr. Baldwin keeps a close eye on the latest exoplanet research, somehow balancing his astronomical scholarship with a career as consultant psychiatrist at the 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust (Warrington, UK). Read on to learn a great deal about where current thinking stands on a subject critical to the question of red dwarf habitability. by Ashley Baldwin "Tidal locking", "captured rotation" or...

Our Sun is a G2V type star, or to use less formidable parlance, a yellow dwarf. It was inevitable that as we began considering planets around other stars (well before the first of these were discovered), we would imagine solar-class stars as the best place to look for life, but attention has swung to other possibilities in recent years, especially toward red dwarfs, which comprise a high percentage of all the stars in the galaxy. Now it seems that the problems of M-dwarfs are causing a reconsideration of the class in between, the K-class orange dwarfs. Alpha Centauri B is such a star, although its proximity to Centauri A may raise problems in planet formation that we have yet to observe. Fortunately, our long-distance exploration of the Centauri stars is well underway, and we should have new information about what orbits the two primary stars here within a few short years. If we were to find a habitable zone rocky world around Centauri B, one thing that makes it interesting is the...

Remembering how I felt 50 years ago when Apollo 11 launched, I fully understand those whose sense of let-down at the abrupt end of the moon landings has never gone away. And yes, I was one of those who assumed we would be on Mars by 1990 or earlier, with missions to the Jovian moons gearing up about now. Events in the interim have proven these expectations unrealistic, but last night as I was reminiscing I also thought about what we had done in those 50 years. 50 years ago, for example, the idea of Europa as an ocean world was still a few years out, only entering into serious speculation after Voyager 1 showed us what Jupiter’s immense tidal forces, aided by the gravitational effects of Europa and Ganymede, could do to Io. That flyby was in March of 1979, and if Io’s volcanoes told a tale, they also implicated Europa’s abundant ice. The Galileo mission, despite its problems, then showed us a Europan surface wracked by movement, with ‘chaos’ features, raft-like ice blocks evidently...

Centauri Dreams' resident film critic Larry Klaes continues his in-depth look at science fiction movies with 1972's Silent Running, whose protagonist is faced with a stark choice far from home. The film rode the era's surging interest in environmentalism, and while overshadowed in the memory of many of us by 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey (and what SF film isn't?), it has interesting connections with that film. Douglas Trumbull, who handled special effects for 2001, was the force behind Silent Running, and concepts originally envisioned for the former turned up in the latter, especially in the depiction of Saturn. How Saturn might have played into the earlier film -- and why Jupiter took its place there -- is just one of the historical avenues Larry explores in this wide-ranging essay. By Larry Klaes "On this first day of a new century, we humbly beg forgiveness and dedicate these last forests of our once beautiful nation to the hope that they will one day return and grace our foul...

The advantages of neutral particle beam propulsion seem clear: Whereas a laser's photon beams can exchange momentum with the sail, neutral particle beams transfer energy and are considerably more efficient. In fact, as we saw in the first part of this essay, that efficiency can approach 100 percent. A mission concept emerges, one that reaches a nearby star in a matter of decades. But what about the particle beam generators themselves, and the hard engineering issues that demand solution? For that matter, how does the concept compare with Breakthrough Starshot? Read on as James Benford, working in collaboration with Alan Mole, describes the salient issues involved in building an interstellar infrastructure. By James Benford and Alan Mole We discuss the concept for a 1 kg probe that can be sent to a nearby star in about seventy years using neutral beam propulsion and a magnetic sail. We describe key elements of neutral particle beam generators, their engineering issues, cost structure...