Texas Astronomers Collaborate to Find Goldilocks Planet
The planet is the first located in the "just-right" orbit that's not too hot, nor too cold for water to exist in liquid form, making life as we know it possible.
The planet is the first located in the "just-right" orbit that's not too hot, nor too cold for water to exist in liquid form, making life as we know it possible.
Astronomers have discovered the most massive black holes to date — two monsters weighing as much as 10 billion suns and threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.
Dodson-Robinson will use funding to support her research program called "Giant Planets in Dusty Disks."
A team of researchers has used NASA's Kepler space telescope to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other.
We have all experienced gravity, but even to the brightest minds in science, it remains largely a mystery. Gary J. Hill, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, is trying to change that.
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be larger than any telescope in existence today. When completed it will take advantage of seven large light-gathering mirrors at a prime observing site to see the distant reaches of the universe. It will also produce images up to 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. Ten institutions, including The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M, are partnering to raise the funds necessary to build the GMT — in what will likely be a paradigm shift in what we know about the universe.
Astronomy student Krista Smith fulfills her dream to become an astronomer and studies quasars, the massive, incredibly distant, extraordinarily bright galaxies with active black holes at their center.