Variable Stars and the Stories They Tell: Exoplanets and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
©February 2018 by Dale Alan Bryant
(In memory of M.I.T. astrophysicist Dr. Philip Morrison - who started all this...)
Though the figures are tough to keep up with - they are changing, almost daily - the Kepler Space Telescope (KST) has discovered, to date, over 4,500 exoplanet candidates, ~3,400+ of which have been confirmed.
AAVSO Councillor Kevin Paxson has completed and presented the results of the AAVSO's survey of the professional astronomical community. The AAVSO solicited participation from professional astronomers in an online survey early this year, and the results are now available in both raw and summarized form, with commentary and analysis from Kevin. The results were presented at the 2013 Spring Meeting of the AAVSO, and the final reports are now available here.
2012 was another good year for science generated by the international variable star community, and your efforts played a role in helping advance the science of variable star astronomy. The AAVSO as an organization continued to play a major role in providing access to amateur and professional data archives, along with providing new means to obtain observations (via AAVSOnet) and publish results (via the Journal of the AAVSO).
The AAVSO's volunteer-driven project to digitize paper archives of variable star observations is moving forward, and there have been some exciting developments over the past few months that deserve to be mentioned. Here, I'll summarize some of the happenings in this project, and talk about some of the issues that have arisen at AAVSO and among the volunteers.
Distances in the universe are so vast that we do not have a simple way of measuring them. For distances within the solar system we can measure them directly, using radar for example, and some very straightforward trigonometry. But radar is hard to use when it takes light minutes or hours to cross the solar system; and the nearest star is four light years awa
Variable stars highlight an important fact about the heavens above us: the universe is always changing. The universe is very large, stars and galaxies are very far away, and many changes occur on timescales far longer than we can see. Most things in the sky -- stars, nebulae, and galaxies -- don't appear to change at all during the course of a human lifetime.
