If, in 2009, you asked 18-year-old me to name an exoplanet, then Gliese 581d would have been it. Discovered by an American team of astronomers in 2007, it was, for a long time, the poster child ...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/gliese-581d-is-an-ex-planet/
For 3 months a year, the TNG telescope on the island of La Palma turns its high-precision spectrometer (HARPS-N) towards the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. This is the field of view that NASA...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/keplers-last-stand-verification-by-multiplicity/
As readers of my previous post will no doubt know; the future looks grim for exoplanetary science. Kepler is dead, Hubble will soon follow and we face a long wait before the next generation of pl...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/what-can-plato-do-for-exoplanet-astronomy/
This blog was first published as a guest post on Andrew Rushby’s excellent II-I- blog. In the 1890s Percival Lovell pointed the huge, 24-inch Alvan Clark telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona towards...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/the-hunt-for-an-exo-earth-how-close-are-we/
The last year has been an extraordinary one for exoplanetary science. With nearly 200 new planets found, and thousands of scientific papers produced, it was tough work narrowing down such a year ...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/2013-in-exoplanets/
In six hours’ time, A Soyuz rocket will blast of from Guyana with the hope of delivering a €1billion Christmas present to astronomers across the world. That present will be Gaia, ESA’s fla...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/gaia-an-early-christmas-present-for-astronomy/
Astronomers have now found an astonishing 1000 exoplanets. But that pales in comparison to the 100 billion stars in our galaxy. So how can we say whether planets are the norm? And is it possible ...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/a-planet-for-every-star/
A low autumn sun illuminates white-tinted grasses and lichens, each covered in beads of ice from the first deep frosts of winter. A lone Arctic Fox treads lightly on freshly fallen snow, making i...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/from-nuclear-weapons-to-death-stars/
Hundreds of astronomers across the globe are currently searching nearby stars for a fleeting glimpse of astronomical gold dust: exoplanets. I am also part of the search, scanning through terabyte...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/whats-in-a-name/
At around midday on Tuesday this week, on a page buried deep in the internet, a small counter ticked over to an important new value. Despite it’s obscurity, the slow and infrequent beat of this...
https://lostintransits.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/1000-exoplanets/