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NASA Exoplanet Science Institute Headlines

NExScI is the science operations and analysis center for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. We provide tools and archives for the exoplanet community, administer the Sagan program of fellowships and workshops, and support the Keck Interferometer and administration of the NASA Keck telescope time.

2012 Sagan Summer Workshop on Working with Exoplanet Light Curves

The 2012 Sagan Summer Workshop on Working with Exoplanet Light Curves will be held July 23-27, 2012 on the Caltech campus. Visit the website for preliminary information.

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

image A team led by NExScI scientist John Johnson used data from NASA's Kepler mission to discover the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. Click here for the press release.

Exoplanet Motion Seen by Sagan/Michelson Fellows

Former Michelson Fellow Remi Soummer leads a team, including Sagan Fellow Laurent Pueyo, that has re-examined Hubble Space Telescope data from 1998 to find visual evidence for two of the four planets orbiting HR8799. Finding visual evidence for two of these planets in the 1998 Hubble data gives astronomers a time machine for comparing much earlier orbital motion data to more recent observations. Click here for the press release.

Billions of Planets

image NExScI scientist Dr. Stephen Kane co-authored a paper which appeared in the January issue of Nature that announced the discovery that the Milky Way galaxy contains at least 100 billion planets from statistical studies of microlensing events. The study further shows that small terrestrial-sized planets are more common than large Jovian-sized planets. Click here for the NASA press release.

NASA Exoplanet Archive

NExScI is pleased to announce the release of the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Funded by NASA, this new service serves the user community working with exoplanet data, primarily transit data sets from Kepler and CoRoT, by providing long-term data curation and analysis tools. The archive content includes exoplanet and stellar host properties and Kepler candidate properties in interactive tables and time series data from space- and ground-based projects. Analysis tools include visualizations, periodogram calculations, and transit ephemeris predictions. The new service is available at exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu and more information is available here.

February 2012 Meetings Announced

IPAC will host a pair of meetings the week of Feb. 13-17, 2012. A conference on Science with a Wide-field Infrared Telescope in Space will occupy the first part of the week, followed by The 16th International Conference on Gravitational Microlensing. More information can be found on the meeting website.

Habitable Zone Gallery

This Habitable Zone Gallery provides information for exoplanetary systems with known planetary orbital parameters. It includes a planetary properties table with the percentage time spent in the HZ, a gallery that plots the orbits and the location of the HZ, and movie animations for each of the planetary orbits. Click here to enter the gallery!

Call for NASA Keck Observing Proposals

The call for 2012A proposals for NASA Keck time is closed. Proposals for 2012B will be due March 15, 2012. Semester 2012A is the last chance to use the Keck Interferometer. Click here for more information.

NExScI 101

For an introduction to NExScI's managed and supported data tools, archives, telescope time, meetings, and fellowships, click here. This PDF file contains the NExScI brochures and handouts prepared for the January 2012 AAS meeting in Austin.