Undergraduate and graduate astronomy students studying the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are being exposed to opportunities to conduct research outside of the classroom and make contributions to this growing field.
Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and member of the University's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, has been named the recipient of the 2019 Drake Award by the SETI Institute.
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.
A team of more than 200 researchers is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the "most mysterious star in the universe." KIC 8462852, or "Tabby's Star," has been inexplicably dimming and brightening sporadically like no other. Several theories abound to explain the star's unusual light patterns, including that an alien megastructure is orbiting the star.
Astronomers at Penn State have used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a blistering-hot giant planet outside our solar system where the atmosphere "snows" titanium dioxide — the active ingredient in sunscreen. This discovery, and other observations made by the Penn State team, provide insight into the complexity of weather and atmospheric composition on exoplanets, and may someday be useful for gauging the habitability of Earth-size planets.
A free presentation titled "Searching for Alien Megastructures: Hype vs. Reality" will take place at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 1 in 100 Thomas Building on Penn State's University Park Campus. The lecture will be presented by Jason Wright, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. The event is part of the 2015 Friedman Lecture Series in astronomy, which is free and open to the public.
The "man in the moon" appeared when meteoroids struck the Earth-facing side of the moon creating large flat seas of basalt that we see as dark areas called maria. But no "face" exists on farside of the moon and now, Penn State astrophysicists think they know why.
A team of Penn State astronomers using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas has obtained precise measurements of these stars, which will aid astronomers in understanding how stars and planetary systems form.
A loose group of stars that has been known for more than 180 years but never before studied in detail has been revealed to be an important new tool in the quest to understand the evolution of stars like the Sun, and in the search for planets like Earth. "We have discovered that a previously unappreciated open star cluster, which is a little younger than our Sun, holds great promise for use as a standard gauge in fundamental stellar astrophysics," said Jason T. Wright, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, who conceived and initiated the research.
Wright's research team's first paper on the cluster, known as Ruprecht 147, has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal for publication. Team member Jason Curtis, a graduate student in Wright's lab, led the work for this paper and will present the team's project in Barcelona, Spain, next week at the 17th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun.
It's a planet like our own in size and composition, and one where
surface conditions could support life, explains Jason
Wright, assistant professor of Astronomy.
