Astrometry
Gaia is Now Finding Planets. Could it Find Another Earth?
The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky…
Variable Stars can Tell us Where and When to Search for Extraterrestrials
A new study cross-references supernova from the Gaia observatory's third data release with possible alien transmissions.
A Direct Image of a Planet That’s Just Like Jupiter, Only Younger
In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory…
Astronomers Find a Sun-like Star Orbiting a Nearby Black Hole
Using data from the Gaia Observatory, a team of astronomers has detected a Sun-like star that co-orbits with a dormant…
Gaia Could Detect Free-Floating Black Holes Passing Near Stars in the Milky Way
The thing with black holes is they're hard to see. Typically we can only detect their presence when we can…
The Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES) Could Detect Exoplanets Within a few Dozen Light-Years of Earth Using Astrometry
A team of Chinese researchers has proposed a new mission to find Earth-like planets in neighboring star systems - the…
The First Rogue Black Hole has Been Discovered, and it’s Only 5,000 Light-Years Away
Microlensing strikes again. Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star…
Do Stars Move? Tracking Their Movements Across the Sky
The stars look static in the sky, but are they moving? How fast, and how do we know? What events…
GAIA is “Go” for Science After a few Minor Hiccups
In astronomy we throw around the term "light-year" seemingly as fast as light itself travels. And yet actually measuring this…