Astrophysics Institutes

Astrophysics Spotlights

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Astrophysics Institutes

TESS: Searching Closer to Home

Dec 12, 2011

In the ongoing hunt for planets beyond our own solar system, spacecraft in coming years will focus their telescopes on the nearest stars – those in our immediate neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, in development at MIT, is being designed to search for the most promising exoplanet targets for next-generation studies.

One Promising Puzzle Piece for Confirming Dark Matter Now Seems Unlikely Fit, Researchers Find

Nov 23, 2011

New research adds doubt that a prominent European astrophysics experiment may have found evidence of dark matter. In an interview, Stanford's Stefan Funk and Justin Vandenbroucke talk about their findings, as well as how they tricked a telescope into searching for particles it wasn't designed to detect.

Exoplanets: How the Milky Way is Surprising Scientists

Sep 13, 2011

Three prominent researchers discuss how recent findings from the Kepler mission are deepening our understanding of planets beyond our solar system, and expanding our view of where life may exist in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Turning Data Into Wild Rides Through Dark Domes

Aug 1, 2011

From their seats in the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, visitors swoop through a redwood forest, into a single redwood leaf and finally into an individual cell to watch photosynthesis take place. Then they travel back billions of years to watch the first stars wink on, heat up and explode, scattering into space many of life’s essential chemical elements.