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CALLING ALL EARLY CAREER SCIENTISTS! PASSIONATE ABOUT SCIENCE? LOVE TO COMMUNICATE? You are wholeheartedly invited to participate in FameLab: Exploring Earth and Beyond…at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference! FameLab is something like American Idol for scientists… Sponsored by NASA and National Geographic, it’s a fun-filled day of competition, coaching, and camaraderie that’s all about science communication! At regional heats held across the US over the next year, early career scientists from diverse scientific disciplines craft a 3-minute, powerpoint-free.... |
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Whether in our solar system or beyond, the search for habitable environments is tightly tied to a search for liquid water. The reason is that wherever we find liquid water on Earth, we find life. (The few caveats to this involve mixtures that are so salty that life can’t squeeze the water out of the environment.) So let’s take that as a hypothesis: where you find water, you find life. Absent a life-detection mission to another planet, or a telescope.... |
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Today, an announcement came out about a paper led by Ravi Kopparapu that updates the habitable zone, moving it further out in space from host stars. I really like this paper (on which I’m a co-author) because it demonstrates how science often progresses: through a series of incremental improvements, the totality of which has profound implications for a handful of known planets. Here’s the new habitable zone, in pretty picture form (courtesy Chester Harman/Penn State): You see, the habitable zone.... |
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Appropriate, eh? Read on for what to look for over the next four weeks through the long winter nights. As always, this is the work of Gordon Johnston — thanks, Gordon! |
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Bad news for exoplanet lovers: Kepler is in trouble. There are gyroscopic wheels that help point the spacecraft towards its target stars (and planets!), and one of them is experiencing too much friction. They tried a few remedies, but none of them seemed to get rid of it. So now they’ve put the spacecraft in “safe mode” in hopes that a little rest will do it some good. (There’s a joke in there somewhere about my knees and ankles after a.... |
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In my last post, I talked about why I think KOI-172.02 is uninhabitable. But in the words of The Dude, And… in a way, it is just my opinion. KOI-172.02 sits in a bit of a “grey area” where we can’t *absolutely* rule out habitability, but it’s habitability depends on the planet being different from Earth in important ways. The habitable zone calculations I was basing my analysis on assume the planet absorbs incoming radiation about as efficiently as the.... |
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Astrobiology Magazine Top Story |
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