Anomalous objects are a problem -- we need more than one to figure them out. One 'hot Jupiter' could have been an extreme anomaly, but we went on to find enough of them to realize this was a kind of planet that had a place in our catalog. Or think of those two Kuiper...
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An Origin for a Far Traveling Asteroid
I used to think the Kuiper Belt object Quaoar was hard to pronounce ("Kwawar"), and even muffed it despite having plenty of time to practice before the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Pontus Brandt (JHU/APL) had mentioned Quaoar in his talk in...
A Fleet of Sail-driven Asteroid Probes
One of the great values of the Kepler mission has been its ability to produce a statistical sample that we can use to analyze the distribution of planets. The population of asteroids in our own Solar System doubtless deserves the same treatment, given its importance...
New Insights into Long-Period Comets
The Voyagers' continuing interstellar mission reminds us of how little we know about space just outside our own Solar System. We need to learn a great deal more about the interstellar medium before we venture to send fast spacecraft to other stars. And indeed, part of...
A New Look at Ice on Ceres
Ceres, that interesting dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, is confirmed to be just as icy as we had assumed. In fact, a new study of the world, led by Thomas Prettyman (Planetary Science Institute), was the subject of a press conference yesterday at the American...
A New Dwarf Planet (and its Implications)
A dwarf planet designated 2015 RR245 (and now in search of a name) has been found in an orbit that takes it out to at least 120 AU. It's a discovery made by the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS), an international collaboration focused on the Solar System...
Asteroid Mining: A Marker for SETI?
Having just finished Iain Banks' The Player of Games, I'm thinking about the 'orbitals' he describes in his series of novels about the Culture, a vast, star-crossing civilization that can build space habitats in the form of massive rings. Orbitals are smaller than the...
Hunting Asteroids (and Money)
A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences points out that NASA has been tasked to locate 90 percent of the most deadly objects that could conceivably strike our planet. Yet only about a third of this assignment has been completed, and the money has yet to...
Asteroid Belts, Possible Planets Around Epsilon Eridani
Two asteroid belts around Epsilon Eridani? So we learned yesterday, a fascinating find and one I want to discuss today, but only after celebrating Epsilon Eridani itself. Can any star have a more interesting pedigree? This is one of the Project Ozma stars, the other...
SETI and Gravitational Lensing
Radio and optical SETI look for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations even though we have no evidence that such exist. The search is eminently worthwhile and opens up the ancillary question: How would a transmitting civilization produce a signal strong enough for...