Oh.

Well that’s good.

IF we older types don't completely destroy everything first...

Now if he could just understand GRAVITY.... We could all have flying cars, just like the Jetsons...

good job Wolf

while he's still in high school. My congrats to him.

my grand daughter is in the aeronautical engineering program Florida Technical Institute and over the holidays I tried to have a convo about what she studies. I don't speak the kind of English she does when she explained it to me but it had something to do with working toward moving people to Mars.

I once asked her about the symbols she uses for Physics. Her reply, "Oh, that's simple"

She's almost 19 y.o.

that doesn't seem too strange or amazing.

I mean, hey it's a fun story and headline, but I could set my 10 year old in front of a spreadsheet of TESS data and ask her to find the outliers (brightest and darkest) and she could probably do the same thing. It's not like he was looking through a telescope at a star and found something new or plotted out the changes over weeks/months of searching like when astronomers find new things. This is literally what TESS was built to do, take readings of star brightness for comparison purposes.

In both the Star Trek and actual universes!

....wonder if he's been out on a date yet? (I'M KIDDING!)

Astronomy has to be a tedious task, and a lonely one, too.

BTW, I went to college with a guy who won the Nobel Prize in Physics about 25 years ago for discovering the first binary pulsar.

so to answer your question, NO!

was the first graduating class that has never lived without the Internet.

Go figure!

Can he find Iran on a map??

I'm not a Science or Space nerd so I am not precisely sure what "extremities in the binaries" means.

But my punk rock sense of humor says that's gotta be a Pere Ubu or Talking Heads lyric (somewhere).

Actual career astronomers don't often look through a telescope any more.

Exoplanets is the current hot field in astronomy. My Son the Astronomer is currently working on his PhD in that field. He's working on a computer program to better locate exoplanets.

There are several different methods used, and generally (if I understand this correctly) they try to confirm a newly-found planet by finding it with at least two of the methods. A good 4,000 plus have been found so far, which is quite impressive. Apparently, almost every single star out that has planets.

Enheartening story and great quip! I love to have my faith restored in the new generation about to step up.

...needs scientists given what we have done to them.

Speaking from familial experience, our government laboratories, should they survive the ignorance foisted by the Republican Party, are a huge resource in training them.

This is wonderful.