News
Archive
April 18, 2012 - Professor Debra Fischer was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of her scientific contributions in astronomy. Dr. Fischer was one of six Yale faculty members elected to the 2012 Class of Fellows.
April 18, 2012 - On Wednesday, April 18, author and astrophysicist, Marc Kuchner, conducted a workshop at Yale on Marketing for Scientists. The workshop was based on Dr. Kuchner's book by the same title.
February 28, 2012 - Announcing a second Planet Hunters paper, Planet Hunters: New Kepler planet candidates from analysis of quarter 2, which presents new planet candidates identified by volunteers engaged in the Planet Hunters citizen science project.
January 19, 2012 - We are proud to announce that Dr. Christian Schwab was awarded a prestigious 2012 Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship. The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute's Sagan Fellowships "support outstanding recent postdoctoral scientists to conduct independent research that is broadly related to the science goals of the NASA Exoplanet Exploration program. The primary goal of missions within this program is to discover and characterize planetary systems and Earth-like planets around nearby stars."
January 15, 2012 - The BBC News invites citizen scientists to explore PlanetHunters.org and join in the hunt for nearby planets that could support life.
November 18, 2011 - The Planet Hunters project is featured on WNPR, the Connecticut Public Broadcast Network, in a look at crowdsourced science. Listen to this episode of the 'Where We Live' program on the WNPR website.
October 27, 2011 - Through a 10-year, $12 million agreement in 2009, Yale purchased rights from the California Institute of Technology to use the telescope at Keck Observatory, which sits atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii, for 15 nights per year. ... Five astronomy professors interviewed said the station has bolstered Yale’s image as a leader in the field of astronomy and dramatically expanded the research capabilities of the department. For more details, see the full Yale Daily News article.
September 23, 2011 - The Yale Exoplanet Group recently announced six planets that were previously unknown, five of which were in multi-planet systems. The inner planet in one of these systems, HD 163607b, is the most eccentric planet in any multi-planet system detected to date, which has interesting implications for the physical mechanisms under which planetary systems evolve. These discoveries also helped Yale astronomers determine that more than half of the smaller planets, so-called Super-Earths, are members of multi-planet systems like our own solar system. For more details, see the two papers below:
- A High Eccentricity Component in the Double Planet System Around HD 163607 and a Planet Around HD 164509
- M2K: II. A Triple-Planet System Orbiting HIP 57274
September 22, 2011 - The first two potential exoplanets discovered by Planet Hunters users was announced today. See the Yale Press Release, read the paper, Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data, or see news coverage about the discoveries on CNN, MSNBC, Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy, PC Magazine, or the International Business Times' Science section, among others.
September 13, 2011 - Announcing the Origins @ Yale Fall 2011 Seminar Series, a series of interdisciplinary "Origins" discussions at Yale that are intended to draw together the broad range of expertise of the faculty, researchers and students. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanets has energized scientific research across several fields, ranging from the formation and evolution of life, to the structure of other planets. Join us if you can!
March 16, 2011 - The team commissioned a new spectrograph, CHIRON, at the 1.5-m CTIO telescope. The spectrograph was designed by A. Tokovinin (CTIO), C. Schwab (Yale) and J. Spronck (Yale) and was funded under an NSF ARRA grant (P.I. Fischer). This was an outstanding experience for everyone involved and time will be available on this new facility instrument beginning in 2011B through SMARTS and NOAO. There are 4 observing modes that are currently supported: narrow slit (R=120,000), normal slit (R=90,000), image slicer (R=90,000) and fiber (R=30,000).
March 3, 2011 - PlanetHunters have identified 47 prospective transit candidates, not on current Kepler lists. We sent the top ten candidates to the Kepler team and they report that all of these candidates successfully passed their data validation pipelines (two were eclipsing binary systems). Congratulations to the Citizen Scientists!
February 2, 2011 - NASA's Kepler mission discovers over 1,200 potential planets, including a fascinating six-planet system, and over 50 planets that may be in their suns' habitable zones. Watch the NASA press conference, or read more about it in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, Universe Today, and other news sites.
February 1, 2011 - PlanetHunters.org finds promising planet candidates in the Kepler data. Read more on MSNBC.com.
December 16, 2010 - Web users around the globe can now help professional astronomers in their search for Earth-like planets, using an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters. Join the search at http://www.planethunters.org.
For Current News, see the Exoplanets homepage.
