Daniel Apai's Blog on Exoplanet Exploration and Astrobiology
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…
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…