NASA To Announce New Planetary Discoveries by Kepler “NASA will host a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 2, to announce the Kepler mission’s latest findings about planets outside our solar system. The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.”

Citizen Scientists Join Search for Earth-like Planets, Yale University “Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA’s Kepler mission. The space telescope has been searching for planets beyond our own solar system — called exoplanets — since its launch in March 2009.”

First Directly Imaged Planet Confirmed Around Sun-like Star, Gemini Observatory “A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The newly confirmed planet is the least massive planet known to orbit at such a great distance from its host star. The discovery utilized high-resolution adaptive optics technology […]

Pave New Worlds, Are We Alone podcast, SETI Institute “The extra-solar planet count is more than 400 and rising. Before long we may find an Earth-like planet around another star. If we do, and can visit, what next? Stake out our claim on an alien world or tread lightly and preserve it? We’ll look at what our record on Earth says about our planet stewardship. Also, whether a massive technological […]

Waterworld Discovered Transiting a Nearby Star, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics “Astronomers have announced that they have discovered a “super-Earth” orbiting a red dwarf star only 40 light-years from Earth. They found this nearby planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable […]

ESO: Media Telecon to Discuss Significant Exoplanet Finding “On Monday 19 October 2009, astronomers will report at the international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, Portugal, on a significant discovery in the field of exoplanets, obtained with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope.” From the same authors, using the same instrument: arXiv:0906.2780: The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XVIII. […]