Along with Alycia Weinberger and Ian Thompson, Alan Boss has been running the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search (CAPS) program, which searches for extrasolar planets by the astrometric method, where the planet's presence is detected indirectly through the wobble of the host star around the center of mass of the system. With over eight years of CAPSCam data, they are beginning to see likely true astrometric wobbles beginning to appear. The CAPSCam planet search effort is on the verge of yielding a harvest of astrometrically discovered planets, as well as accurate parallactic distances to many young stars and M dwarfs. For more see  http://instrumentation.obs.carnegiescience.edu/ccd/caps.html

Image courtesy NASA

Scientific Area: 
Astronomy
Reference to Person: 
Alan Boss
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Earth's Moon, public domain image
Where is Earth’s submoon?
January 23, 2019

Pasadena, CA— “Can moons have moons?”

This simple question—asked by the four-year old son of Carnegie’s Juna Kollmeier—started it all.  Not long after this initial bedtime query,  Kollmeier was coordinating a program at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP)  on the Milky Way while her one-time college classmate Sean Raymond of Université de Bordeaux was attending a parallel KITP program on the dynamics of Earth-like planets.   After discussing this very simple question at a seminar, the two joined forces to solve it.  Their findings are the basis of a paper published in Monthly Notices

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Carnegie’s Miguel Roth Receives Highest Civilian Honor for Non-Chilean: The O’Higgins Order
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An artist’s conception of a type Ia supernova exploding, courtesy of ESO.
Calibrating cosmic mile markers
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Pan-STARRS image showing the host galaxy of the newly discovered supernova ASASSN-18bt
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The Giant Magellan Telescope Project

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The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey

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