Dr Dimitri Veras and James Blake of the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability make the case for space travel to asteroids in this article for The Conversation.

CEH member Richard West leads the fascinating discovery of an exoplanet that falls in the middle of what has been termed the 'Neptunian desert'. This refers to a region close-in to the parent star where previously no Neptune-sized exoplanets had been found. NGTS-4b has a mass 20 times that of the Earth and orbits its star (a 13th mag K dwarf) once every 1.34 days! What's more, it's the smallest planet discovered by a wide-field ground-based photometric survey to date - excellent work!

This study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 486, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 5094–5103

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: Richard West (lead), Daniel Bayliss, James Jackman, George King, James McCormac, Peter Wheatley, David Armstrong, Paul Chote, Ben Cooke, Emma Foxell, Boris Gänsicke, Tom Louden & Don Pollacco

James Blake, a postgraduate student in the Warwick Astronomy & Astrophysics Group, gives an overview of his summer project researching the topic of panspermia and applying the theory to the exciting TRAPPIST-1 planetary system.

CEH member James Jackman leads a recent study of flares in G-type stars, as observed using NGTS. The study shows that G-stars can have flares many times the energy of the Carrington event, and the primary detection is one of the largest amplitude superflares detected from a bright G star.

This work was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 477, Issue 4, p.4655-4664

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: James Jackman (lead), Peter Wheatley, Chloe Pugh, Boris Gänsicke, Anne-Marie Broomhall, David Armstrong & James McCormac

CEH member Mark Hollands leads a new study which examines pollution of cool DZ white dwarfs.

This work was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 477, Issue 1, p.93-111

Open access link: arXiv

CEH members involved: Mark Hollands (lead), Boris Gänsicke