Marc Kuchner is an American astrophysicist, a staff member at NASA's

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

 Goddard Space Flight Center

Goddard Space Flight Center

The Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC employs approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors, and is located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. GSFC,...

. Together with Wesley Traub, he invented the band-limited coronagraph

Coronagraph

A coronagraph is a telescopic attachment designed to block out the direct light from a star so that nearby objects – which otherwise would be hidden in the star's bright glare – can be resolved...

, a design for the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder

Terrestrial Planet Finder

The Terrestrial Planet Finder was a proposed project by NASA to construct a system of telescopes for detecting extrasolar terrestrial planets. TPF was postponed several times and finally cancelled...

 telescope, also to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope. He helped popularize the ideas of ocean planet

Ocean planet

An ocean planet is a hypothetical type of planet whose surface is completely covered with an ocean of water.Planetary objects that form in the outer solar system begin as a comet-like mixture of roughly half water and half rock by mass...

s, carbon planet

Carbon planet

A carbon planet, also referred to as a diamond planet or carbide planet, is a theoretical type of planet proposed by Marc Kuchner that could form if protoplanetary discs are carbon-rich and oxygen-poor. According to planetary science, it would develop differently from Earth, Mars and Venus, planets...

s, and Helium planet

Helium planet

A helium planet is a theoretical type of planet that may form via mass loss from a low mass white dwarf star. Ordinary gas giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn consist primarily of hydrogen, with helium as a secondary component...

s and made some of the first observations of a debris disk

Debris disk

A debris disk is a circumstellar disk of dust and debris in orbit around a star. Sometimes these disks contain prominent rings, as seen in the image of Fomalhaut on the right. Debris disks have been found around both evolved and young stars, as well as at least one debris disk in orbit around a...

 orbiting G29-38

G29-38

Giclas 29-38 is a variable white dwarf star of the DAV, or ZZ Ceti,whose variability is due to large-amplitude, non-radial pulsations, known as gravity waves. It was first reported to be variable by Shulov and Kopatskaya in 1974...

, a metal-rich White Dwarf

White dwarf

A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a small star composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. They are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. Its faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored...

. 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
  Vega
  Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus...
  
  
• Epsilon Eridani
  Epsilon Eridani
  Epsilon Eridani is a star in the southern constellation Eridanus, along a declination 9.46° south of the celestial equator. This allows the star to be viewed from most of the Earth's surface. At a distance of 10.5 light years , it has an apparent magnitude of 3.73...
  
  
• Exozodiacal dust
  Exozodiacal dust
  Exozodiacal dust is the exoplanetary analog of zodiacal dust, the 1-100 micrometre-sized grains of silicate dust that fill the plane of the solar system, especially interior to the asteroid belt. As for the zodiacal dust, these grains are probably produced by outgasing comets as well as by...
  
  
• RS Ophiuchi
• Sirius
  Sirius
  Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, it is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. The name "Sirius" is derived from the Ancient Greek: Seirios . The star has the Bayer designation Alpha Canis Majoris...
  
  
• 61 Cygni
  61 Cygni
  61 Cygni,Not to be confused with 16 Cygni, a more distant system containing two G-type stars harboring the gas giant planet 16 Cygni Bb. sometimes called Bessel's Star or Piazzi's Flying Star, is a binary star system in the constellation Cygnus...
  
  
• RS Canum Venaticorum variable
  RS Canum Venaticorum variable
  RS Canum Venaticorum variables are a type of variable star. They are close binary stars having active chromospheres which can cause large stellar spots. These spots are believed to cause variations in their observed luminosity...
  
  
• Kuiper Belt
  Kuiper belt
  The Kuiper belt , sometimes called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a region of the Solar System beyond the planets extending from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, although it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive...
  
  

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"