Stargazing Live viewers find four-planet solar system
Australian volunteer citizen scientists have found four previously unknown planets orbiting a nearby star thanks to a crowd-sourcing project aired on the ABC's Stargazing Live. The four "Super Earth" planets are about double the size of Earth and are orbiting a star in the Aquarius constellation 600 light years away, said Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse. Read more
Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain are at Jodrell Bank Observatory, and joined by special guests to bring you the latest news and the best views of the night sky.
This week sees the return of the BBC's highly successful Stargazing Live. It starts on Tuesday, in an episode that follows last year's biggest astronomy story by focusing on Mars. In thinking about the search for possible life on Mars, the programme will include some of the historical observations and debates that I discussed in a previous post. I'm delighted that the programme gave us at the Royal Observatory a chance to recreate a key Greenwich contribution to the story. Read more