Cav's Place

As you should already know, today marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight. As such, for some it may be a time to remember the past, but for most it should be a time to think of the future. After all, though currently we are the Earth’s and our own only realistic […]

Saw this line in a comment someone posted when it was first announced that MESSENGER has been successfully inserted into orbit around Mercury and couldn’t help but use it as the title of this post. Indeed it seems like an achievement worthy of such a title, mainly because of the way in which it was […]

Little Gliese 581 is an entirely unremarkable star. Like the vast majority of known stars in our galaxy, it’s an M dwarf. More exactly, its spectral class is M3V, which is about a third of a class away from the dimmest possible main sequence stars, the lower limit for them being estimated around M6.5. Compared […]

I find it quite nice that “the 2010 version of the space race”, as someone put it, seems to focus on finding extrasolar planets quite a lot. This has become much more noticeable over the past few days, when the HARPS, HATNet and Kepler teams have all announced new discoveries. The rush was apparently caused […]

As the Kepler team is bent on secrecy, at one point even attempting to obtain approval not to release any information until the primary mission finishes, which is scheduled for the end of 2012, we can only be thankful for such slips that can shed just a little bit more light on their finds. Sure, […]