Vicki Oransky Wittenstein

Yesterday’s New York Times profile of planet hunter Geoff Marcy brought back great memories of my trip to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii during the summer of 2009.  I spent a few days with Geoff learning about planet hunting for… Read the rest >>

Well-known planet hunter Geoff Marcy and scientists from the University of California, Berkeley ([U.C. Berkeley] and the University of Hawaii, Manoa announced exciting news yesterday.  By computing data from the Kepler Space Mission, they figured out the number of Earth-like… Read the rest >>

The planet hunting community is mourning the loss of the Kepler Space Telescope, and so am I. Since May, Kepler technicians have been trying to fix the telescope’s broken reaction wheel, a mechanism that keeps the telescope steady and controls… Read the rest >>

Astronomer and world-famous planet hunter Geoff Marcy is not just searching for extrasolar planets these days. Now he’s looking for signs of alien civilizations. The Washington Post and other media announced today that Marcy received a $200,000 grant from the… Read the rest >>

Oh no. The Kepler Space Telescope — responsible for detecting 135 confirmed planets and over 3,500 planet candidates — is malfunctioning and has shut down. The problem stems from a faulty reaction wheel that keeps the telescope pointed and aimed.… Read the rest >>

In case you missed it, journalist Kate Murphy wrote an article about astronomer Geoff Marcy’s personal tastes in reading, watching, listening, and purchasing in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times yesterday. Marcy recommends a new book about… Read the rest >>

Planets are everywhere! A team of scientists operating NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope announced the detection of an astounding number of new planets — 1,235. In a front page article in the New York Times, reporter Dennis Overbye quoted Geoff Marcy,… Read the rest >>

Bookslut.com gave PLANET HUNTER a shout out in the September 2010 newsletter. Check it out in Off the Map, a column written by Colleen Mondor. One of the reasons I decided to profile Marcy, as opposed to just writing about… Read the rest >>

While I was vacationing on eastern Long Island in New York, a reporter for the SOUTHAMPTON PRESS, Phoebe Nir, wrote an article about me, my book PLANET HUNTER, and the talk I gave at The Quogue Library. Phoebe described my… Read the rest >>

Check out the wonderful new book trailer for PLANET HUNTER below! Produced by Lisa Gottfried of DigitalWeavers, the trailer peeks inside the book and tells the story of Geoff Marcy and other key astronomers in their search for planets like… Read the rest >>