Getting spacey

Even if you are not paying attention, our awareness and understanding is steadily expanding. I would love it if all that effort was ultimately and directly applied to improving the human condition.

Scientists Discover 10 New Planets Outside Solar System
An international team of astronomers has found 10 new "extra solar" planets, planets that orbit stars other than our sun. The team used a system of robotic cameras that yield a great deal of information about these other worlds, some of which are quite exotic. The system is expected to revolutionize scientific understanding of how planets form.

Two participating astronomers from the U.S. are Rachel Street and Tim Lister. Street is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN) located in Santa Barbara. Lister is a project scientist with LCOGTN.

Team leader, Don Pollaco of Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, will announce the findings in his talk at the Royal Astronomical Society's national astronomy meeting in the U.K. on Wednesday, April 2.

The new international collaboration is called "SuperWASP," for Wide Area Search for Planets.

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