2007-11-14

Astrophysics 2020

I spent the day at Astrophysics 2020 at STScI. I was inserted into the extrasolar planet session, which was not totally appropriate, but I was cool with it, because I learned a huge amount. In particular, I learned that a lot of the figures of merit for extrasolar Earth-like planet detection go like the telescope diameter to the fourth power, and we are talking about telescopes in space, of course! But I also learned that there are dozens of transiting planets, some of which have both primary and secondary eclipses measured, and some of which are only tens of Earth masses in size. After the meeting I have no doubt that we are going to find Earth-like planets soon; I agree with the speakers that it is imperative that it be a top NASA priority moving forward.

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