Whittier College graduate Chris J. Marvin '09 is part of an international team of astronomers which has recently announced the discovery of two new planets orbiting Kapteyn's star, a nearby halo red dwarf. One of the planets, a temperate super-Earth called Kapteyn b, lies in the star's "habitable zone," the range of distance that could support water—and potentially, life as we know it—on a planet's surface. The findings were published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. Marvin is participating in this research as part of his Ph.D. thesis. A physics major at Whittier, Marvin is currently working on his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Goettingen in Germany. Read more about the discovery in Newsweek and National Geographic.
