There is a new top candidate for the best place to search for life outside our Solar System. Announced in Nature on April 20th 2017, LHS 1140b is a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a nearby small star. This is the story of that discovery and the role PEST played.Read More →
I set PEST up to discover planets. That was the Big Hairy Goal. And because these planets would be mine – all mine – I would be able to call them PEST-1b etc. That would have been seriously cool. It hasn’t worked out that way. The reasons why are instructive.Read More →
Astronomers sometimes blithely talk about ‘bright’ stars. If an exoplanet transits a bright star, we will be able to measure the the parameters of the planet, eg mass and radius to greater precision, and perhaps to sniff its atmosphere. But in everyday terms, how bright are these stars?Read More →
Look through the list of PEST discoveries and ground-based planet searches generally, and you will find plenty of so-called hot Jupiters. Strangely we now know that hot Jupiters are rare. Read More →