by Jonathan Nally | Jul 3, 2020 | Amateur astronomy, Astronomy, Planets
ABOVE: An artist’s impression showing a Neptune-sized planet in the ‘Neptunian Desert’. It is extremely rare to find an object of this size and density so close to its star. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick. THE SURVIVING CORE OF A GAS GIANT...
by Jonathan Nally | May 27, 2020 | Amateur astronomy, Astronomy
ABOVE: TG Tan and the PEST Observatory in his backyard, with which he hunts for transiting exoplanets. EVERY TWO YEARS, AUSTRALIA’S PROFESSIONAL ASTRONOMERS bestow the Berenice and Arthur Page Medal on an amateur astronomer who has made significant scientific...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 4, 2020 | Astronomy, Planets, Telescopes
Above: NEID team members installing a large prism into the spectrometer. NEID should have three times the precision of previous radio velocity spectrometers, enabling it to discover more Earth-mass exoplanets. Courtesy the NEID team. ASTRONOMERS HOPE A NEW...
by Jonathan Nally | Aug 5, 2019 | Astronomy, Planets, Telescopes
Queensland’s only professional research observatory for astronomy teaching and research training, the University of Southern Queensland’s Mount Kent Observatory, is playing a leading role in NASA’s new planet-finding space mission. The MINERVA-Australis facility at...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 9, 2018 | News, Planets
Pictured: An artist’s impression of the trio of super-Earths discovered by a European team using the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile, after 5 years of monitoring. The three planets, having 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of...