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!
All posts by Daniel Apai
About Daniel Apai
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…
Extrasolar Storms: Belts, Spots, and Waves in Brown Dwarfs
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…
Exoplanets: Headlines from the Future
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…
Mont Blanc, Slopes, Skiers, and the HST/WFC3 Ramp Effect
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…