Marc Kuchner

Marc Kuchner (born August 7, 1972) is an American astrophysicist, a staff member at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Together with Wesley Traub, he invented the band-limited coronagraph,^[1] a design for the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope, also to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope. He helped popularize the ideas of ocean planets,^[2] carbon planets, and Helium planets^[3] and made some of the first observations of a debris disk orbiting G29-38, a metal-rich White Dwarf. Kuchner received his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard in 1994 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech in 2000. Kuchner was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on coronagraphy. Kuchner appears as an expert commentator in the emmy nominated National Geographic television show "Alien Earths" and frequently answers the "Ask Astro" questions in Astronomy Magazine.

See also

• Vega
• Epsilon Eridani
• Exozodiacal dust
• RS Ophiuchi
• Sirius
• 61 Cygni
• RS Canum Venaticorum variable
• Kuiper Belt

References

1. ^ Kuchner, M. & Traub, W.A. (2002). "A Coronagraph with a Band-limited Mask for Finding Terrestrial Planets". "The Astrophysical Journal" 570, 900-908. (Abstract)
2. ^ Kuchner, M. (2003). "Volatile-rich Earth-Mass Planets in the Habitable Zone". "The Astrophysical Journal" 596, L105-L108. (Abstract)
3. ^ Seager, S.; M. Kuchner, C. Hier-Majumder, B. Militzer (2007). "Mass-Radius Relationships for Solid Exoplanets". ApJ 669: 1279

External links

• www.marckuchner.com
• NASA webpage. http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/Marc.Kuchner/home.html
• Marketing For Scientists
• NASA Dust Model Presents Alien's View Of Our Solar System, Huffington Post, 9-28-10
• American Physical Society Podcast
• "Earth-Like Planets May Be Made of Carbon" Scientific American, January 2010
• NPR's Morning Edition "Sci-Fi To Fact: Planet Hunters Find Worlds Like Earth"
• NPR's All Things Considered "Newly Discovered Planet Could Be A Watery World"

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Name	Kuchner, Marc
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Date of birth	August 7, 1972
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