Exoplanetary Science

Be aware of two meetings of relevance for interstellar studies, the first of which takes place today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, a symposium called The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets runs all day, with presentations from major figures in the field — you can see the agenda here. I bring this up [...]

Gravitational microlensing to the rescue. We now have evidence for the existence of the rogue planets — interstellar wanderers moving through space unattached to any star system — that we talked about just the other day. It’s been assumed that such planets existed, because early solar systems are turbulent and unstable, with planetary migrations like [...]

My friend Adam Crowl, a polymath if there ever was one, is working hard on Project Icarus and keeping an eye on the exoplanet situation. When you’re working on a starship design, no matter how theoretical, a major issue is the choice of targets, and the study of Kepler planets we looked at yesterday caught [...]

Over 900 stars have been found that show signs of a debris disk, a circumstellar disk of dust and debris orbiting the star. It takes less than 10 million years for the gaseous content of these disks to dissipate, leaving the dusty disk behind. You can think of the Kuiper Belt in our own system, [...]