Exoplanet Caught on Camera!

All right, I told myself I’d restrict my blogging to once a week so I could get my homework done or something, but this is just too cool:

Astronomers finally took a picture of an extrasolar planet.

(I got the image from the press release on EurekAlert.)

I know it just looks like a fuzzy dot, but it’s a gigantic breakthrough. Until now, astronomers only knew the planets were there because their gravitational tug made their parent star wobble, or because they eclipsed the star every so often, dimming its glow. Now that we can take pictures, we’ll be able to figure out what they’re made of, what their atmospheres are made of, how hot they are, all sorts of things! So exciting!

The New York Times coverage is excellent, and includes some colorful quotes. Go give it a read, if you haven’t yet.

But Ryan Anderson (my former Marslab colleague at Cornell) notes the image bears an eerie resemblance to something far more sinister…

Farewell, Freezing Phoenix

Ashes to ashes, I guess: JPL announced on Monday that the Phoenix Mars lander bit the dust.

We always knew it would end like this. The Martian winter is setting in, and Phoenix won’t get enough sunlight to keep its batteries charged up at the north pole. NASA hasn’t heard from the lander since November 2, and after a week of radio silence, they called it quits.

But they’re saying it’s “an Irish wake, not a funeral”–Phoenix did some awesome stuff! It continued the Mars Exploration Rovers’ tradition of outlasting its expected 90-day lifespan (Phoenix lasted five months; the rovers are approaching their fifth birthday). It found ice just below the surface. It took more than 25,000 pictures. It found evidence that liquid water existed on Mars in the past millennium or so. It even saw snow!

The lander’s accomplishments are summarized in several other places: the JPL press release, the New York Times, and this adorable blog it’s been keeping on Gizmodo, also a good source for lively descriptions of what the lander’s been up to. (This post has a video of Martian clouds. Awesome.)

So this is certainly a time for celebration as much as mourning. But the image of the lonely lander, freezing to death at the edge of a planet, entombed in the very ice and snow it came to study is…well, chilling.

Hello, world!

Welcome to my Blog O’Science! This site is still very much under construction. Enjoy these radio telescope jokes while you wait:

A radio telescope is like a ball of string. Kittens enjoy playing with them.

A radio telescope is like a high school teacher: constantly (and fruitlessly) searching for intelligent life.

A radio telescope is like Pluto. It’s not a planet.

A radio telescope is like Tarot cards. It takes a lot of studying and at least as much blind faith to understand what they’re saying.

A radio telescope is like the Holy Roman Empire. It’s not holy, it’s not Roman, and it’s not an empire.