Mcdonald Observatory Archives

GJ 3378b orbits a small cool red dwarf -- Grok via Astrobiology.com

Nearby “Super Earth” May Be A Better Candidate For Life Than Previously Thought

by Keith CowingJuly 4, 2026July 4, 2026

[UT Austin] Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought. The […]

View from the surface of the habitable-zone super-Earth exoplanet GJ 3378b. The planet has a minimum mass just over twice that of Earth and orbits its star at a distance that causes it to receive almost the same amount of starlight as Earth does. The planet joins a growing population of potential hosts for life in the nearby universe. -- Grok via Astrobiology.com

Exoplanets, -moons, -comets

A New Earth-like Exoplanet Discovered

by Keith CowingJuly 1, 2026July 3, 2026

[UC Irvine] A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Irvine reports the discovery of a new Earth-like exoplanet orbiting a star about 25 light-years from our solar […]

Spectrograph configuration -- astro-ph.IM

Astrochemistry, Astronomy & Telescopes, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

MOSES — The MONET Star and Exoplanet Spectrograph

by Keith CowingJune 10, 2026June 10, 2026

We introduce MOSES, the new High-Resolution Echelle Spectrograph designated for the 1.2m MONET telescope at McDonald Observatory, Texas, USA.

Radial velocity data for GJ 3378. Top: the combined RV time series. The orbit model is shown as a dashed line. Middle: RV residuals to a 1-planet model. Bottom: RVs phase-folded to the period of the exoplanet. Phase-binned RVs are shown as squares. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone super-Earth GJ 3378b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline

by Keith CowingMay 19, 2026May 19, 2026

The nearby (d=7.7 pc) M4V star GJ~3378 is a target of our radial velocity (RV) exoplanet survey of fully convective stars in the Solar neighborhood with the near-infrared spectrograph HPF […]

The frame rotates with the planetary mean motion, so the position of observers rotates clockwise, with regions of start, pre, transit, post, and end shown in observations divided by black dotted lines. The logarithm of gas density is shown in the color scale. A low-density but relatively fast stellar wind expands from HAT-P-32 A at the coordinate origin and interacts with the outflow from HAT-P-32 b. The outflow from HAT-P-32 b is stretched into long, column-like tails leading and trailing the planet along the orbital path. These tidal tails are shaped by the advection of slow-moving planetary outflow in the star-planet gravitational field. Credit: M. MacLeod (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and A. Oklopčić (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam). - McDonald Observatory - ScienceAdvances

Astrochemistry, Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Press Release

Astronomers Observe Giant Tails of Helium Escaping Jupiter-Like Planet

by Keith CowingJune 9, 2023June 9, 2023

A team of astronomers has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory to discover some of the longest tails of gas […]

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Press Release, Proxima Centauri

25-Year-Old Hubble Data Confirms Exoplanet Proxima Centauri c

by Keith CowingJune 2, 2020December 3, 2022

Fritz Benedict has used data he took over two decades ago with Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the existence of another planet around the Sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, and […]