A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their host star occur around stars similar to our sun.
To commemorate its 10th anniversary, Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds will host a celebration on April 2, with three sessions of talks and panel discussions for technical, academic and public audiences.
A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine sets the stage for Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds to expand its role in NASA's exoplanetary science initiatives.
“Water world” planets, those covered with a deep global ocean, could maintain surface conditions similar to that of the Earth for over a billion years, say researchers.
The Penn State Cyber-Laboratory for Astronomy, Materials, and Physics (CyberLAMP) is acquiring a high-performance computer cluster that will facilitate interdisciplinary research and training in cyberscience and is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The search for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy has revealed an extraordinary family of planets whose orbits are so carefully timed that they provide long-term stability for their planetary system. A paper describing the formation of this planetary system by a research team that includes a Penn State astrophysicist will be published in the journal Nature on May 11.
The MINERVA telescope in Arizona was dedicated in an official ceremony at the facility on Mount Hopkins on May 18. Penn State partners with three other universities on MINERVA, with each university contributing one of the array’s four telescopes: Harvard University, the University of Montana, and the University of New South Wales. A fifth institution, the University of Pennsylvania, operates a sister project, MINERVA-Red, at the same site.
Mysteries about controversial signals coming from a dwarf star considered to be a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life now have been solved in research led by scientists at Penn State.
A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind -- as frosty as Earth's North Pole -- has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our sun.
Alexander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, has been honored with the 2012 National Geographic Traveler Grand Prix award, which is given annually for “overall achievement in travel, science or exploration along with the pursuit of a life-long passion.” Wolszczan was honored in May at a ceremony in Warsaw, Poland. He received the Traveler Grand Prix Award statuette as well as a tricolored flag, which symbolizes the 125th anniversary of the National Geographic Society’s founding that is being celebrated this year.
A free presentation titled "Are We Alone?" will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 9, in 100 Thomas Building. The program will be presented by Jill Tarter, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project at the SETI Institute. The event is part of the 2012-13 Friedman Lecture Series in Astronomy, which is free and open to the public.
A pair of newly discovered stars 6.5 light years away is the third-closest star system to the sun and the closest discovered since 1916. It is an excellent hunting ground for planets because it is very close to Earth and, in the distant future, it might be one of the first destinations for manned expeditions outside our solar system, according to the discoverer, Kevin Luhman, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics and researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.
The explosion of digital data is behind the boom in careers based on statistics, including actuarial science, informatics, and machine learning, Altman notes. “These fields have all been very highly ranked for a number of years now,” she explains. “Data are a huge resource, but statisticians are needed to help people make sense of the information gathered.
A team of astronomers from Penn State and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland has discovered a new planet that is closely orbiting a red-giant star, HD 102272, which is much more evolved than our own Sun. The planet has a mass that is nearly six times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The team includes Alexander Wolszczan, the discoverer of the first planets ever found outside our solar system, who is an Evan Pugh professor of astronomy and astrophysics and the director of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State; and Andrzej Niedzielski, who leads his collaborators in Poland. The team suspects that a second planet may be orbiting HD 102272, as well. The findings, which will be published in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal, shed light on the ways in which aging stars can influence nearby planets.
Developing strategies for finding life on other planets and in extreme environments on Earth will be the focus of Penn State's new astrobiology initiative under a five-year grant from NASA's Astrobiology Institute for "Signatures of Life from Earth and Beyond." Christopher H. House, associate professor of geosciences, will lead an interdisciplinary team to develop methods to detect and characterize life, look for biological signatures in relevant ecosystems in ancient rocks and other places on Earth, and evaluate the potential for biological signatures to exist in extraterrestrial settings. Penn State is the only university that has been continuously funded by NASA's Astrobiology Institute, according to House.
