These pages chronicle the work and ruminations of Carolyn Collins Petersen, also known as TheSpacewriter.

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I am CEO of Loch Ness Productions. I am also a producer for Astrocast.TV, an online magazine about astronomy and space science.

For the past few years, I've also been a voice actor, appearing in a variety of productions. You can see and hear samples of my work by clicking on the "Voice-Overs, Videos and 'Casts tab.

My blog, TheSpacewriter's Ramblings, is about astronomy, space science, and other sciences.

Ideas and opinions expressed here do not represent those of my employer or of any other organization to which I am affiliated. They're mine.

Visit my main site at: TheSpacewriter.com.

**Comments are welcome; I do moderate them to weed out spam.

Contact me for writing and voice-over projects at: cc(dot)petersen(at)gmail(dot)com

I Twitter as Spacewriter

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Not Only Is It a Planet…

May 5, 2005 at 13:02 pm | Leave a Comment

Courtesy European Southern Observatory

We’re all pretty used to looking up in our night sky and seeing one or more of the other planets in our own solar system. We can observe them through telescopes, photograph them, and record their path across the sky over many nights.

For a long time now, we’ve been seeing reports of planets around OTHER stars, but seeing them optically (as opposed to deducing their existence by catching their influence on their parent stars by studying spectra, for example) has been difficult. At least, that was the case until the Yepun telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal facility, found a planet around a distant star.

The cool thing about this finding is, not only is it an image (as opposed to spectra), but the planetary object is orbiting a brown dwarf star! These are dim, cool stars that are difficult to observe anyway, but to find a planet around one and actually image it is an amazing feat! You can read more of the details about this finding here.

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What would such a system look like if we were to fly a spacecraft by for a look-see? Here’s an artist’s conception of it.

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This blog a wholly pwnd subsidiary of Carolyn Collins Petersen, a.k.a. TheSpacewriter.
Copyright 2008, Carolyn Collins Petersen
Inama Nushif!
Image of Horsehead Nebula: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

“It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion. It is by the juice of bean that coffee acquires depth, the tongue acquires taste, the taste awakens the body. It is by Coffee alone I set my day in motion.”

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Not Only Is It a Planet…