Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[TomK]

Well, I think it happens to many people in the latter stages of their careers—more management and admin, less time doing what they enjoy, and stuff they were never trained or wanted to do. As you can see in one or two other threads, some have more free time than they can handle. I envy them in a small way.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The star is close, relatively speaking, the planets are too hot for life, but we’re getting closer to finding nearby earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Scientists have confirmed the existence of four small, rocky planets orbiting Barnard's Star — the second closest star system to Earth — using a specialized instrument on the mighty Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Just six light-years away from us

https://www.space.com/the-universe/exopl...-neighbors

[TomK]

Thanks, HOTPE. Barnard's star is infamous, not because it's the closest star but due to its high proper motion, which means we've known it's close for decades even though it's faint. M-dwarfs are the most common stars in the Galaxy. They are smaller and cooler than our sun and have been targets for habitable exoplanet searches for some time, mainly because it's much easier to detect objects orbiting smaller and less bright stars. For those interested, there's a Nature article from 2023 that goes into the subject. It's worth a read. Note that our sun is a G-type star (hotter and more massive than M-dwarfs) which may help understand the first diagram in the article.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37487-9