Viewing profile — semaphoreP

Probably pretty difficult to find too many compelling cases. The bands starlink transmits in are designated communication bands, so interference from other satellites is going to b…

Astronomer here, we are thinking about doing interferometers in space[1,2], but it won't be a catch-all for everything. One reason is that the instrumentation is equally as importa…

Note that in these images, the planets are unresolved. They are point sources. Point sources span multiple pixels due to the sampling theorem.

And this is the program that will study this system: https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/program-informa...

Ah my bad, I mean that in the visible, you can't reach the diffraction limit with AO like you can in the near infrared. Certainly impressive matching HST from the ground. I don't t…

Adaptive optics is really only effective in the infrared. And really only in the near-infrared, as past 5 microns, we can't really see through the atmosphere. In the visible, groun…

It's not the absolute value of the signal. What they're measuring the amount of water compared to hydrogen.

It's hard to measure absolute water abundances (it requires a lot of assumptions and extrapolating). This is a relative comparison of atmospheric water. We don't have relative wate…

It will be very tough with JWST. Many of the biosignatures are small features, and not so easily detected. There's only a handful of planets for which this might be close to possib…

We've also been observing the universe using neutrinos (generated by the weak force). In fact, there have even been one neutrino event linked to a possible astrophysical source[1],…

Quite possibly I think. This is both confirmation that neutron star mergers do indeed exist and create kilonova, and the first detection of an astronomical event with both gravitat…

Not involved in this, I'm guessing this is how it goes: there are algorithms that automatically register the image that was just taken, diff it with a reference image of the sky fr…

Actually this star is not in the Kepler Field, and it is also too bright for Kepler. Even most ground based telescopes looking for transits probably haven't bothered looking at it,…

Measuring the star wobble (i.e. doppler shift) doesn't give inclinations.

I guess you're right. I know there aren't any observed transits, but I also don't know what the current constraints from monitoring the star's brightness for transit is (the star i…

This title is a bit imprecise. They detected four planets with lower bound on their masses to be down to 1.7 Earth masses. Because these planets don't transit, there are no direct …

I recall there were issues if you tried to modify those files in Windows. Maybe they've fixed that in recent updates, but my impression was that while I could see the files, I shou…

It works great for me. Like others have mentioned, it's not an emulator, so I don't feel sandboxed using it. The main downside is one of the caveats they mention: "Linux files are …

Yeah, I only use Venmo when I'm on the coasts. None of my friends in the Midwest have it, and maybe I'm just used to it, but it just felt inefficient to split the bill and wait for…

Optical interferometers have resolved Betelgeuse down to 9 milliarcseconds (4 x 10^-8 radians), so this isn't even the highest resolution image yet of this star[1]. [1] http://blog…

JWST, like ground-based telescopes now, will be able to separate the light from massive Jupiter-like exoplanets from the light of their host stars. But it won't be able to see thin…

The colors are only there to represent brightness, so the white spot is a brighter patch on the star (brighter because it's hotter).

Or you can think of it as precision in the number of significant digits for a number. Each floating point number can only store a certain amount of significant digits. The fraction…

It will depend on the size of the telescope, but for all practical purposes, these planets are too close to their star to see directly. A starshade will be good for Earth-like plan…