The San Francisco resident and researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a member of one of two astronomy teams awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for making the first direct detection of an extrasolar planet.
How was the planet first detected? This star, Fomalhaut, is a pretty bright star in the southern hemisphere — the brightest in the constellation Piscis Asutrinus. It was originally found to be special back in 1983, when the Infrared Astronomical Satellite discovered its infrared emissions were way brighter than you’d expect them to be.
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