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Enormous Ring System Hints of Exomoons

Might there be gas giant planets somewhere with moons as large as the Earth, or at least Mars? Projects like the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) are on the prowl for exomoons, and the possibility of large moons leads to astrobiological speculation when a gas giant...

Exomoons: A New Technique for Detection

A friend asked me the other day whether my interest in exomoons -- moons around exoplanets -- wasn't just a fascination with the technology of planet hunting. After all, we've finally gotten to the point where we can detect and confirm planets around other stars. An...

Exoplanet Science Beyond JWST

Thinking as we have been about exoplanet detection, and in particular about taking the next steps beyond the James Webb Space Telescope, I'm intrigued to see what has happened with the WFIRST mission. After all, despite the successes of Kepler and ESA's CoRoT, we live...

Exoplanetary Ring Systems and Their Uses

What to say about an extrasolar ring system that has already had its four distinct rings named? Rochester, Sutherland, Campanas and Tololo are the Earth-bound sites where the unusual system was first detected and analyzed, and the international team of researchers...

Three Exoplanets Smaller than Earth

It’s always gratifying to note the contributions of amateur astronomers to front-line science. In the case of three small planets discovered around the Kepler star KOI-961, the kudos go to Kevin Apps, now a co-author of a paper on the new work. It was Apps who put...

On Habitable Worlds and Their Moons

One of the problems with building a backlog of stories is that items occasionally get pushed farther back in the rotation than I had intended. Such is the case with an article in Astrobiology Magazine that talks about how much of a factor a large moon may be in making...

Exoplanet Aurora as Detection Tool

Although we're finding more and more exoplanets, we can always use another technique besides radial velocity, transit searches, direct imaging and microlensing. And now Jonathan Nichols (University of Leicester) has proposed one at the Royal Astronomical Society's...

Detecting Exoplanet Volcanoes

We're entering the era of the 'super-Earths,' when rocky planets larger than our own will pepper the lists of new discoveries. These smaller worlds will occasionally make a transit of their star, as does CoRoT-7b, and that's when things really get interesting. After...