Blog Posts

January 2024: “Bolder than Webb?” Former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s OpEd in Aerospace America makes a strong statement on the importance of inspiring, bold visions for next-generation NASA missions. Goldin argues that the current path will lead to a decade(s)-long gap in major improvements of space telescope capabilities, which poses a substantial risk for American leadership in space…

We are making exciting progress on the world’s largest multi-order diffractive lens, a new technology to transform how we are designing and building space telescopes. Read about our project in my new article in The Conversation! Check out the project website to learn more about the Nautilus Space Observatory!

Exciting two days at Biosphere 2! We just wrapped up our first in-person the Pandora Science Team meeting. Pandora is a NASA-funded space telescope, part of the new NASA Pioneers space telescope program. This is a very exciting program: NASA challenged teams to build space telescopes that do cutting edge science – but to do this…

During an exciting visit to Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy, I have the opportunity to deliver the 2022 Crotts Radical Hypothesis Lecture. The lectures honor the memory of Arlin Crotts, a brilliant and visionary astrophysicists, whose work and discoveries profoundly influenced many fields of modern astrophysics: From dark matter haloes through light echoes to the…

Amazing new data from JWST shows its capability to analyze the compositions of exoplanet atmospheres. Will it find life?

An excellent article by Mikayla Mace Kelley from UA News on our team’s work on using a scalable biotechnology solution to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Read about how we combine astrobiology, biosystems engineering, and ecology for a novel approach to mitigating a global challenge. Small but mighty: How UArizona professors are harnessing the power of…

With Alien Earths in full swing, I had the opportunity to present an overview and some exciting early results at the Origins Seminar series. Great turnout and fun questions!

We were excited to see that the 80th anniversary special issue of Sky & Telescope on the “Future of Astronomy” prominently features our Nautilus Space Observatory concept in a 2-page in-depth report!

The next generations of space telescopes will bring about orders-of-magnitude increases in our observing capabilities. Many of these aim to search for atmospheric signatures of life, that would most likely emerge from the largest biomass on the planets – most likely microbial life. However, excitingly, the powerful telescopes of the future could also help us look…

It has been a busy two weeks with lots of results and exciting news. Just at the beginning of 2021, our team learned that our SmallSat mission proposal, Pandora, was selected by NASA! Pandora is a very exciting, fact-paced mission that will explore the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets and the activity of their host stars…

Our exciting new results on TESS observations of the atmospheric dynamics of the closest brown dwarfs are out! Here is a link to the Astrophysical Journal paper that describes the findings. Thanks to Mimmo Nardiello’s mastery of the TESS data, we could present an amazing rich lightcurve on the closest brown dwarf system to the…

The American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics‘ ASCEND2020 event was an exciting amalgam of governmental groups, entrepreneurs, academia, aerospace corporations, and everyone interested in Space 2.0 and the new economic opportunities it may bring along. With over 3,000 attendees from 32 countries and 1,300 organizations, it has been a fascinating event to attend. I was…

A few days ago we got a very exciting news: Our Alien Earths team was selected by NASA for a major award within its ICAR (Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research) program! The $6M funding awarded to our Alien Earths team will enable a very exciting and cutting-edge portfolio of research projects for the next five…

The following is our article, as published in The Conversation, written by Daniel Apai and Jeremy Dietrich. Only 12 light years from Earth, Tau Ceti is the closest single star similar to the Sun and an all-time favorite in sci-fi stories. Habitable worlds orbiting Tau Ceti were destinations of fictional starships like “The Expanse”‘s Nauvoo and “Barbarella”’s…

Building on our exciting new results on the tau Ceti system – led by Jeremy Dietrich – I created a simple visual journey through the system. Look out for a story next week on The Conversation about our work on exploring nearby planetary systems!

Excited to announce our new paper on the information contained in the age-dependence of biosignatures in samples of broadly earth-like planets. Our paper – that appeared on arXiv a few hours ago and is in press at the Astrophysical Journal – explores two important questions: 1) If we detect possible biosignatures in an exoplanet survey,…

Read our article for The Conversation on TESS’s exoplanet bounty and the importance of finding planets in the Solar neighborhood!

Great news and big changes for our team in Spring 2019! Elena Manjavacas has accepted an offer and moved to Hawaii to start her new position as Support Astronomer at the Keck Observatory! Aidan Gibbs was admitted to several top astronomy grad programs. Ben Rackham was awarded with the 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellowship, which…

A few days ago we posted a new paper on arXiv on the spectacular spiral in the HD 100453 system. The new paper, led by Steward astronomy graduate student Kevin Wagner, settles the question of the origin of the enigmatic spiral arms. This rare two-armed spiral structure was discovered by Kevin – as a first-year…

I am glad to announce a postdoctoral opportunity within the EOS/NExSS project, in my group at Steward Observatory in Tucson. We are excited to connect and compare planet formation models and their predictions to exoplanet populations; we are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with expertise in planet formation, exoplanet population studies, and/or statistical assessment of…

Can we detect atmospheric biosignatures in the next two decades? Only if we can meet a major, newly-recognized challenge to our studies of exoplanet atmospheric composition. Over the past years the Hubble Space Telescope has proven to be our most powerful tool to probe the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets: the comparison of spectra taken before…

Our new paper came out today in Science, presenting evidence for bands, zones, spots, and waves in brown dwarfs and a model that explains well several until-now mysterious changes in the brightnesses of brown dwarfs. Podcast: Learn more about our project from the Science Magazine’s podcast!   I am excited about our results because they open a new…

The field of exoplanet is exploding: on a typical day about a dozen new peer-reviewed exoplanet studies are published and most weeks see announcements of multiple discoveries: new results range from the compositions and structures of exoplanet atmospheres through new findings on exoplanet formation and exoplanet population to exciting discoveries of the smallest, coolest, or lowest-mass…

It is a beautiful, sunny, but cool day in the little village of Servoz in the French Alps: surrounded by breathtaking snow-capped mountains – among them the legendary Mont Blanc – I am sitting on a tiny railway station waiting for the little red mountain train that will carry me out of the valley. With…

Just got back from majestic Sedona, Arizona, where my family and I spent Thanksgiving. Sedona is a  charming and crazy amalgam of spectacular geology, amazing autumn foliage, exciting restaurants, and an eclectic mix of new age shops and centers. Believers of aura photos, energy vortices, and natural healing flock from all over the country to…

I always found whales fascinating and after a recent workshop in Seattle, WA, I jumped on a whale-watching boat. It was great fun – we have seen a pair of humpback whales and a fin whale, all set in an amazing landscape.