The Art of Exoplanets
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Description
While astronomers have identified over 500 planets around other stars, they’re all too small and distant to fill even a single pixel in our most powerful telescopes. That’s why science must rely on art to help us imagine these strange new worlds.
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One year ago, astronomers announced the discovery that seven roughly Earth-sized worlds orbited around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. Now a year later, additional data have refined our understanding of these planets.We now know more about the TRAPPIST-1 system than any other solar system other than...
Published 02/22/18
This artist's concept animation shows a brown dwarf with bands of clouds, thought to resemble those seen on Neptune and the other outer planets in the solar system.
Published 08/17/17
May 3rd, 2017 marks the 5,000th day of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope mission. This video gives us a detailed look at six of these days, showing how an automated observatory like Spitzer, which is effectively an astronomy robot, spends its time. It’s overall mission design allows for an...
Published 05/03/17