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…
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About Daniel Apai
Alien Earths Team Selected for major new NASA Astrobiology Award!
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…
New Method Helps Astronomers Find Yet Undiscovered Worlds around Nearby Stars
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…
Visiting the tau Ceti System
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!
The Age-Oxygen Relationship: Testing Earth-like Atmospheric Evolution in Living Worlds
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,…
NASA’s TESS spacecraft is finding hundreds of exoplanets – and is poised to find thousands more
Read our article for The Conversation on TESS’s exoplanet bounty and the importance of finding planets in the Solar neighborhood!
Great news!
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…
The Mysteries of a Circumstellar Spiral and the London Fog
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…
Exoplanet Postdoc Position Open
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…
Transit Spectroscopy, Biosignature Searches, and the Myth of Perfect Stars
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…