So we’re all at the Wyoming InfraRed Observatory.  The telescope is huge and beautiful.  Sadly, it’s cloudy.  It’s been beautiful all week and the clouds came in as we were driving up.  So, we’re all sitting and standing around in the computer room while the two grad students who are up here are explaining what it is that they do.  They spend eight days at a time here and then another team will spell them.

There’s an observatory cat, who is a working mouser.

When they are looking at a star and see a wobble which indicates a planet, what they are actually seeing is red and blue shift.  So the wobble is toward and away from us.  I always thought it was left right, but its toward and away.  And they can see down to 8 meters a second.  So imagine a guy running toward you and then away.  That’s darn precise.

Amateur astronomers are looking for light curves, which is when the planet passes in front of the star it causes a small light dip.  There are close to 300 exoplanets identified.  What we’re finding are the big ones, so there are probably hundreds of smaller planets.  The planets that they’ve seen are mostly huge and very close to their suns.

There’s a telescope, space-based, called SIM that should be able to see the star and its planet.

When they take pictures here they do it with five minute exposures. As light propagates as a wave, it interferes with itself so there’s some extraneous patterns on the screen, which they have to clean out. And then processing the run (which is eight days) can take three weeks.

We’ve shifted to talking about the latest Mars discovery and speculating about what might cause them to brief the President before making an announcement.  Laura is recommending “Vital Dust.” Andrea also recommends “Symbiotic Planet.”

OOO! Looks like the sky has cleared.

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