Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Two New Planets Discovered Using Artificial Intelligence
Using an artificial intelligence algorithm to sift through massive amounts of data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a team of astronomers, led by an undergraduate at UT Austin, has discovered two new exoplanets. The planets are “super-Earths” — planets about twice the size of Earth—that orbit very close to their stars. With orbital periods of 13 days and 2.5 days, each day on these planets is a scorcher! NOAO astronomer Mark Everett is a member of the discovery team.
Read more in the McDonald Observatory press release.
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Join the international star-hunt campaign, Globe at Night, Aptil 25-May 4. Use a smart phone to submit sky brightness in real time! Visit globeatnight.org.
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Observations made with the Event Horizon Telescope have captured the first picture of a supermassive black hole. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a member of the EHT research team. -
On April 1, the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak emerged from hibernation and, for the first time, starlight poured through the six large lenses of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). -
How many and what kind of star clusters have been born in the history of the Magellanic Clouds? A new project, the Local Group Cluster Search, invites citizen scientists to help find out! -
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is being installed on the KPNO Mayall telescope, will use an array of robot fiber-positioners to automatically capture the spectra of 5000 galaxies at a time. -
A Virtual Tour of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: this visualization, featured in the documentary Seeing the Beginning of Time, gives us a virtual peek inside the LSST enclosure. -
Astro2020 Science White Paper Coordination Hub: advertise your Decadal Survey science ideas, comment on science white paper topics, & find others with common interests.
