Kevin B. Stevenson

360-degree panoramic view from atop the Jello Mold (Pu'u Wa'awa'a) on the big island of Hawai'i. This view is from nearly 4,000 feet and depicts Mona Loa in the background and a small cinder cone near its base. The 8-mile round-trip hike took just over 2.5 hours and saw an elevation increase of ~2,000 feet. Click on the image to see the medium-resolution version (2 Mb).

Artist's impression of UCF-1.01, an exoplanet candidate that is two-thirds the size of Earth. The planet was found by Kevin Stevenson in data he was analyzing from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The background planet is the hot Neptune GJ 436b. Because of its proximity to our solar system, the starfield shares many of our culture's cosmic landmarks. To the left, the constellation of Orion gleams, though in a distorted shape compared to our vantage point on Earth.

To take a virtual trip from Earth to UCF-1.01, watch this video.

Left: Artist's impression of the moderately-irradiated Neptune-sized exoplanet GJ 436b. In the Nature article titled "Possible thermochemical disequilibrium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet GJ 436b" by Stevenson et al., we suggest that GJ 436b's atmosphere is abundant in CO and deficient in methane (CH4) by a factor of ~7,000. This result is unexpected because, based on current models at this temperature, the atmospheric carbon should prefer CH4 over CO.

Right: Eclipse lightcurves of GJ 436b. The six lightcurves seen here have been normalized with respect to the system's light (star + planet) and offset vertically for ease of comparison. The observed dips occur when the planet is being eclipsed by its parent star (star light only). The difference between the two levels is the contribution from the planet at that wavelength.