Variable Stars and the Stories They Tell: Exoplanets and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
©February 2018 by Dale Alan Bryant
(In memory of M.I.T. astrophysicist Dr. Philip Morrison - who started all this...)
Though the figures are tough to keep up with - they are changing, almost daily - the Kepler Space Telescope (KST) has discovered, to date, over 4,500 exoplanet candidates, ~3,400+ of which have been confirmed.
We are excited to announce a new feature on our home page, the Stellar News Feed. This is a dynamic list of links to articles and papers dealing with stellar astronomy, including variable stars, stellar evolution, stellar populations, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, exoplanets, and recent discoveries in stellar astronomy and astrophysics.
NASA officials have announced that the spacecraft stabilizers on the Kepler satellite can no longer keep the spacecraft pointed accurately. Plans are being developed to address the problems, but if they are unsuccessful, Kepler's extended mission to search for exoplanets may be ending.
For more information, see this article in SpaceflightNow.
October 17, 2012
Please continue observing J1407 [V1400 Cen] until further notice. - Elizabeth O. Waagen, 1 February 2021
Note: A thread for this campaign has been created in the AAVSO Campaigns and Observation Reports discussion forum: https://www.aavso.org/j-1407-monitoring-campaign
This campaign has been continued through at least 2020. Please continue to monitor J1407, although the level of coverage may be somewhat reduced. - Elizabeth O. Waagen, 17 April 2020
Bruce Gary has announced a one-month pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of observing exoplanet transits of white dwarfs. The advantage of looking at white dwarfs is that the eclipses will be deeper. The disadvantage is they will be very short (on the order of minutes). So there is considerable challenge here!
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| The above infrared image of 2M1207 may be the first picture of an extrasolar planet. |
