Related papers: Crowdfunding Astronomy Research with Google Sky

Over the past two decades, I have been actively involved in teaching astronomy and astrophysics to Chicago Public School (CPS) students and their teachers, in collaboration with various groups as well as by myself. Valuable resources that…

We propose to develop a wide-field and ultra-high-precision photometric survey mission, temporarily named "Earth 2.0 (ET)". This mission is designed to measure, for the first time, the occurrence rate and the orbital distributions of…

The CoRoT and Kepler satellites were the first space platforms designed to perform high-precision photometry for a large number of stars. Multiple systems display a wide variety of photometric variability, making them natural benefactors of…

We present a conceptual design for a space based Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) which will use the gravitational microlensing technique to detect extra solar planets with masses as low as that of Mars at all separations >~ 1 AU.…

We show that a wide-field Kepler-like satellite in Solar orbit could obtain microlens parallaxes for several thousand events per year that are identified from the ground, yielding masses and distances for several dozen planetary events.…

While an astronomer's job is typically to look out from Earth, the seriousness of the climate crisis has meant a shift in many astronomers' focus. Astronomers are starting to consider how our resource requirements may contribute to this…

On 1 February 2011 the Kepler Mission released data for 156,453 stars observed from the beginning of the science observations on 2 May through 16 September 2009. There are 1235 planetary candidates with transit like signatures detected in…

Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…

The 4-year light curves of 156,717 stars observed with NASA's Kepler mission are analyzed using the AutoRegressive Planet Search (ARPS) methodology described by Caceres et al. (2019). The three stages of processing are: maximum likelihood…

Kepler's first major discoveries are two hot objects orbiting stars in its field. These may be the cores of stars that have each been eroded or disrupted by a companion star. The companion, which is the star monitored today, is likely to…

The Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's Great Observatory for infrared astronomy, was launched 2003 August 25 and is returning excellent scientific data from its Earth-trailing solar orbit. Spitzer combines the intrinsic sensitivity achievable…

NASA's Kepler Mission revolutionized exoplanet science in the early part of the 2010's. Looking back from the perspective of the end of that decade, Kepler appears to have burst upon the scene ready for battle, like Athena springing forth,…

Over the past two decades, helioseismology has revolutionized our understanding of the interior structure and dynamics of the Sun. Asteroseismology will soon place this knowledge into a broader context by providing structural data for…

The Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey is observing every Kepler planet candidate host star (KOI) with laser adaptive optics imaging to hunt for blended nearby stars which may be physically associated companions. With the…

We are undertaking an astrometric search for gas giant planets and brown dwarfs orbiting nearby low mass dwarf stars with the 2.5-m du Pont telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. We have built two specialized astrometric…

Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that…

The Astronomical Genealogy Project (AstroGen) has been underway since January 2013. This project of the Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) has been online since July 2020, courtesy of the AAS. The…

In this thesis, I explore two topics in exoplanet science. The first is the prevalence of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. To determine the occurrence of planets having different sizes, orbital periods, and other properties, I…

The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…

Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…