The Moon’s surface is kind of a pain to work with. Gazillions of years of micrometeorite hits and solar radiation has ground the rocks on the lunar surface into dust called regolith, and it’s several centimeters thick. It gets into everything, clogging up machinery, and may even be hazardous to human health if it gets […]

So we’re looking for aliens, right? Listening patiently for signals from aliens takes a long time, and we have to hope they’re out there, and broadcasting.
Some folks wonder if maybe we should be trying to talk to them*. We could aim our transmitters (radio telescopes or possibly optical lasers) at some potentially habitable stars, and […]

I mentioned earlier that all big galaxies have big black holes in their hearts. I also mentioned that the size of the black hole is related to various features of the galaxies, but that might be a little weird because, after all, galaxies don’t live in a vacuum*. There are other galaxies out there, and […]

More brown dwarf news came out of the last press conference: the masses of some of the lowest mass brown dwarfs have been found using the powerful Keck telescope in Hawaii. They did this by precisely measuring the orbits of binary brown dwarfs, and from the well-known equations of how bodies orbit one another the […]

News flash! The lowest mass planet yet found just so happens to orbit a very low mass star — so low mass, in fact, that it might not even really be a star.

Artist’s conception of the newly found system. Credit: NASA

OK, first, the planet. Called MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb — of course! — it has a mass of […]

Pamela and her minions — that includes me — will be streaming video of the press conferences here at the AAS live on the Astronomy Cast UStream channel. I’ve embedded the player below, and I’ll try to post this every day with a schedule so you know when to tune in (the next one is […]

The thing about black holes is, they’re black. That makes them hard to find, of course, but once you find one it’s also hard to get any information about it. The only way we can figure out anything about them is by looking at how they affect things around them: how stars orbit them, how […]

This is a funny way to start my reporting from the American Astronomical Society here in St. Louis, but news waits for no one!
1) First, a favor: if you participated in the online workshop on Sunday — even if you just watched the video stream — then we’re asking that you take just a minute […]

This will be my last post from the actual physical location of the American Astronomical Society meeting; I’ve preloaded this entry to go up when I’ll be on a plane winging it back to Boulder. I’ll have some wrap-up stuff later (oh, just you wait) but since I’m heading back, I want to leave you […]

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When I worked on Hubble data, lo these many years ago, some of the most fun […]