Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces.
Science Magazine wrote a biographical article on Avi Loeb. From Cosmic Dawn To Milkomeda, And Beyond: The thoughts of Harvard theorist Avi Loeb traverse the universe, past and future—and he urges young researchers to be just as daring (pdf)
Astronomy Department Chair Avi Loeb discussed the findings from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite program that showed the universe as being a little older, containing a bit more mysterious dark matter, and expanding more slowly than previously thought.
Read this article in the Harvard Gazette that features Avi Loeb.
Cambridge, MA - The star Eta Carinae is ready to blow. 170 years ago, this 100-solar-mass object belched out several suns' worth of gas in an eruption that made it the second-brightest star after Sirius. That was just a precursor to the main event, since it will eventually go supernova.
“The nearest Earth-like planet is probably 13 light-years away; astronomically speaking, that’s just a stroll across the park,” said Courtney Dressing (right), a doctoral student in Harvard’s Astronomy Department. At the press conference Dressing was joined by Professor David Charbonneau (center) and John Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
A new study finds that researchers can detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a habitable planet orbiting a white dwarf (as shown in this artist’s illustration). Here the ghostly blue ring is a planetary nebula — hydrogen gas the star ejected as it evolved from a red giant to a white dwarf.
THE DEEP END: Images of a small patch of sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field have revealed several of the most distant galaxies ever seen. The newfound galaxies and their associated redshifts are labeled on the Hubble image. Image: NASA/ESA
Read articles from around the world about the discovery of the earliest galaxies, the deepest archeological dig of the Universe so far. It identified a record redshift of 11.9 for a previously known galaxy and provides the first comprehensive census of baby galaxies when the universe was only 400-400 million years old. Brant Robertson, a PhD alumni of Harvard Astronomy department is a member of the discovery team. He was quoted in the following report.
Gurtina Besla, PhD alumni of Harvard Astronomy Department, is lead author on this article featured in this CFA Press release.
One of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way almost got away with theft. However, new simulations convicted the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of stealing stars from its neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). And the crucial evidence came from surveys looking for something entirely different - dark objects on the outskirts of the Milky Way.
Alex Parker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’ Institute for Theory and Computation, has created several astronomical videos on his own time and posted them on the Internet. His latest video depicts the 2,299 planet candidates Kepler has found since it began searching for planets around stars in 2009.
In this artist's conception, a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust (red) is being shredded by the powerful gravitational tides of our galaxy's central black hole. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive black hole twist and warp the fabric of space itself.
An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made the most of a dying star’s fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light-years distant. The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the most distant stellar explosion of its kind ever studied. According to Berger, “It’s like someone turned on a flashlight in a dark room and suddenly allowed us to see, for a short time, what this far-off galaxy looks like, what it is composed of.”
Cambridge, MA - Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years. For the first time it is now possible to build a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies like we observe around us.
