One of the primary goals of exoplanet science is to find and characterize habitable planets, and direct imaging will play a key role in this effort. Though imaging a true […]
astro-ph.IM
Posted inAstrochemistry
HNCO Isomers Formation in Ice Mantles by UV and Thermal Processing
Current gas phase models do not account for the abundances of HNCO isomers detected in various environments, suggesting a formation in icy grain mantles. We attempted to study a formation […]
Posted inAstrochemistry, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets
Chemical Abundances of Stars With Brown Dwarf Companions
It is well-known that stars with giant planets are on average more metal-rich than stars without giant planets, whereas stars with detected low-mass planets do not need to be metal-rich. […]
Posted inMissions & Hardware, Radiation
New Class of Biological Detectors for WIMPs
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) may constitute a large fraction of the matter in the Universe. There are excess events in the data of DAMA/LIBRA, CoGeNT, CRESST-II, and recently CDMS-Si, […]
Posted inAstrochemistry
Bayesian Source Separation Applied to Identifying Complex Organic Molecules in Space
Emission from a class of benzene-based molecules known as Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) dominates the infrared spectrum of star-forming regions. The observed emission appears to arise from the combined emission […]
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets
Exoplanet Adaptive Optics for the 5-meter Hale Telescope
We describe and report first results from PALM-3000, the second-generation astronomical adaptive optics facility for the 5.1-m Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory. PALM-3000 has been engineered for high-contrast imaging and […]
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones
Kepler: Searching The Habitable Zones of the Brightest Stars
In today’s mailing, Hogg et al. propose image modeling techniques to maintain 10-ppm-level precision photometry in Kepler data with only two working reaction wheels. While these results are relevant to […]
Posted inBiosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets
Spectroscopic Direct Detection of Reflected Light from Extrasolar Planets
At optical wavelengths, an exoplanet’s signature is essentially reflected light from the host star – several orders of magnitude fainter. Since it is superimposed on the star spectrum its detection […]
Posted inAstrochemistry
Modeling of Subsurface Ice Mantle on Interstellar Dust Grains
Interstellar ices are layers of molecules deposited on fine dust grains in dark and dense molecular cloud cores. Subsurface ice has been considered in a few astrochemical models, which have […]