Daniel Apai's Blog on Exoplanet Exploration and Astrobiology
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…
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…
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!
Read our article for The Conversation on TESS’s exoplanet bounty and the importance of finding planets in the Solar neighborhood!
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…
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…
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…