Astronomers from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft announced Tuesday that they had discovered a pair of planets the size of Earth orbiting a distant star. The new planets, one about as big as Earth and the other slightly smaller than Venus, are the smallest yet found beyond the solar system. Harvard Astronomy Professor David Charbonneau was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin.
Dimitar Sasselov has a book entitled The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet coming out January 2012.
Saul Perlmutter, Harvard Physics undergraduate, and Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess both Harvard Astronomy PhDs were recepients of the 2011 Nobel Prize for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."
Before Ed Turner and Avi Loeb tell you about their research, they want to make one thing perfectly clear: they do not claim there's a city on Pluto. But if there were, they say, we could see it. And, as they suggest in a paper they've submitted to the journal Astrobiology, it's worth taking a look, just in case.
