The classic sci-fi series Firefly takes place in a 5-star system called the Verse. Unfortunately, the Verse as it was originally envisioned is unstable. Let’s re-imagine the Verse — or actually, four different “Better Verses” that are stable and include all of the elements that made Firefly such a great show.
This is a re-post of an article written by Jason Wright, Steve Desch and myself, and published on medium on July 18th. It’s a more nicely laid out, somewhat more clearheaded, and less snarky version of my blog post ‘Oumuamua: was it aliens? (spoiler: no).You can find the original version here. Discovery of the first…
Could a protoplanet, or even a full-sized planet, be lurking in the icy darkness of the Oort cloud?
Just like a doofus with the remote control bouncing between two TV shows, planets can bounce between stars in a binary system…
Here’s something brand new – we made a big splash!
A pile of free-floaters just dropped with a crash!
A hundred new rogue planets! Yup, we just found ‘em
They orbit among stars instead of around ‘em.
Just one stretched-out orbit takes up lots of space
Can’t add any planets, there just isn’t space
Now, circles are best. And trust me, I’ve tried
Eight or ten orbits fit nicely inside.
Planets and bread may have something in common. The starter. Some of the best breads use a yeast starter. A starter is just a small piece of dough from an older batch of bread. The starter provides the yeast for the next batch. Each batch builds on the last one. An essential ingredient for today’s…
Just like people, planets are born and they die. We know how people die. But google “how planets die” and you’ll get the wrong answer.
Gas giants are the bullies of planetary systems. They are hundreds of times more massive than small rocky or icy worlds, so when gas giants throw a tantrum, their whole planetary system feels it. Giant planet moons are among the innocent bystanders swept up in the chaos. Giant planets around other stars have different orbits…
Systems of super-Earths may form as long resonant chains, most of which go unstable.
This planet and star, now, you really should know ‘em.
And that’s why I’m bothering writing this poem.
Carl Sagan famously called Earth the “pale blue dot”. Viewed from a large distance, that is what our complex, vibrant, living planet looks like. In the search for life around other stars, we should be looking for other pale blue dots, right? Maybe not. There is some reason to think that not all habitable planets…
Welcome to Real-life Sci-fi worlds. I use science to explore life-bearing worlds that are the settings for science fiction stories. Up today: can the moon of a gas giant planet — like Pandora from the movie Avatar — really be habitable? Pandora is one of the coolest-ever settings for a science fiction story. The life-bearing…
That spanking new planet’s already a star. K-186 f, you know who you are. You’re making us wonder if we’re all alone. The planet out there in the habitable zone. I’ve been on the radio. Been on TV. Talking ‘bout the planet. Just what can we see? Just what do we know about this special…
In the spirit of last week’s poetic post, here are two more stanzas for your reading pleasure…. There is a new exoplanet in town. This planet has only just now been found. Why should you care? It’s only one more. Well this is one planet we’d love to explore. This planet’s orbit is really just…
Carnival mirrors. They make you look…. different. Here’s what my son Zack looks like with one carnival-mirror effect on my computer. If every planet we saw was reflected in carnival mirrors, how would we figure out what the planets really look like? It turns out this is how it actually works! Every time we detect…
We’ve discussed some classes of planet that are pretty strange: hot super-Earths, hot Jupiters and eccentric gas giants. But that was just the warm-up. In this post we’ll check out three more extra-weird ones. First up: Tatoine planets. In case you are less nerdy than you should be, Tatooine is where Luke came from in…
Hot Jupiters: check. Super-Earths and mini-Neptunes: check. Up next is another unusual class of planet. But what is different is not these planets’ physical properties but the shapes of their orbits. Time to get technical. An orbit is the path a planet follows around its star. The simplest orbit is a circle with the star…
It’s official: you are weird. It’s nothing personal, you can’t help it. You live in a weird Solar System. It’s just not like other planetary systems. It’s just not SUPER enough…. Most Sun-like stars have a planet orbiting close-by. Not a hot Jupiter — those are rare. Planets just a little bigger than Earth are…
Let’s meet a planet called WASP-12b. [Before you ask, extra-solar planets are named based on how they were discovered or their catalog number. Wasp-12b is the twelfth found by the WASP (“Wide Angle Search for Planets”) survey. The “b” indicates that the object is a companion; Wasp-12 itself is the planet-hosting star.] WASP-12b is a…