Daniel Apai's Blog on Exoplanet Exploration and Astrobiology
Just completed a wonderful trip to D.C. to the AAAS Fellows Forum and a visit to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I was honored to be elected a AAAS Fellow and enjoyed participating in the Fellows Forum, celebrating the new Fellows at the 150th Anniversary of the program. It was thrilling to share this honor…
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…
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…
Read our article for The Conversation on TESS’s exoplanet bounty and the importance of finding planets in the Solar neighborhood!
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…
By Daniel Apai Includes interview with Nick Siegler and Shawn Domagal-Goldman Over the weekend, at the Hilton on the San Diego Bay, a small group met to speak about the present and future of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration program. To someone not in the field of exoplanets the talks and debates may have resembled science fiction: giant space…
Two weeks ago NASA has announced its new Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, which may prove to be a major change in the way NASA will fund exoplanet science in the future. Our UA-led team was part of the first selection and I, the principal investigator of our project, joined the program’s two-day kick-off meeting at…
My Extrasolar Storms talk, given at the Hubble 25 Symposium, is now available online – check it out if you like a mix of the Hubble Space Telescope, iron raindrops, gigantic storms, and methods to map extrasolar planets: https://tinyurl.com/pjjbyv4
The 2014 year has brought much excitement in the field of extrasolar planets and 2015 is set to be at least as exciting as the past year: new powerful adaptive optics systems are searching the northern and southern skies for new exoplanets and Kepler2 should start bringing a large number of new planet candidates! Just…