With Pandora swiftly moving closer to launch, Mission Operation Center lead Karl Harshman and I (as Uof A PI, and Lead of the Pandora Exoplanets Science Working Group) spoke with KOLD13 news about the mission’s science goals.
All posts in Atmospheres
What’s in the crate?
After months of preparation and sorting out the logistics, it is finally here! With the arrival of a special instrument to Tucson, I am very excited to start a new lab for our Nautilus Space Observatory project at The University of Arizona. The crate weighs about as much as an elephant and holds a cutting-edge,…
Pointing to the Poles of Brown Dwarfs: Polar Vortex Possibilities
The AAS Nova featured a nice article by Lexi Gault on our new paper in which Fuda Nguyen and I propose that the polar regions of brown dwarfs (and most gas giant exoplanets) are different from the equatorial and mid-latitude regions: The poles are in a different circulation regime (vortex-dominated) – this means that they have different…
Chasing Storms with TESS: High-speed Winds and Jet Stream Systems in the Closest Brown Dwarfs
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…
Nautilus at ASCEND2020!
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…
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,…
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…