Daniel Apai's Blog on Exoplanet Exploration and Astrobiology
An incredible 24 hours! After a picture-perfect launch, Pandora is now in orbit, with solar panels deployed and alive (receiving commands from ground! After seven years of working on this project, it is so rewarding to see an idea become an actual NASA space telescope, pushing the frontiers of our knowledge. The launch from the…
We just wrapped up a wonderful week in California at the Silver Jubilee of the Summer Sagan School. The school explored exoplanet demographics with many exciting lectures and several hands-on activities and group projects. Many of the lectures and much of the discussion focused on sub-neptunes, an exciting, new type of planets that is absent…
Read my article on The Conversation about the scientific context, importance, and complexity of the announcement that a potential signature of life was found in a transit spectrum of the planet K2-18b. What does it mean? What are the next steps? https://theconversation.com/scientists-found-a-potential-sign-of-life-on-a-distant-planet-an-astronomer-explains-why-many-are-still-skeptical-254900
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.
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…