The October 2026 meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society will be on
Saturday, October 17, 2026
at the
Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Please note the schedule so you won't be late for pizza!
Meeting Agenda:
5:00 PM -- Astro-talk over pizza and soft drinks. (Donations are welcome to offset the cost of food and beverage.)
6:00 PM -- The meeting lecture will begin.
7:30 PM -- After the meeting if weather permits, we will have telescopes set up to view the Moon and Saturn.
Speaker: Daniel Fabrycky
Topic: Can a Planet Handle Two Suns?
About the Presentation:
The sci-fi writers got there first ‐ Luke Skywalker came from Tatoonine, a planet shined on by a pair of stars.
Scientists caught up this last decade, with the discovery of over a dozen planets orbiting the common stellar
configuration called binary stars. Such circumbinary planets are now being discovered by a suite of methods:
crossing in front of their stars, wiggling their stars back and forth relative to our telescopes, and even
changing the orbit the stars make around each other. I will tour these results and describe the prospect of
future observations. Meanwhile, theoretical progress shows us how these new systems stress-test our concepts of
planet formation and evolution, which can impact our origin story, even here in the solo-star Solar System.
About our Speaker:
Daniel Fabrycky is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, which he joined in 2012
after postdoctoral positions at UC Santa Cruz and Harvard. He obtained his BS in Physics at Caltech and his PhD in
Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton. Before all that, he grew up in sweet home Chicago, graduating from Prospect
High School and South Middle School in the Northwest Suburbs. His scientific highlights concern extrasolar planets
(aka exoplanets, those that orbit stars other than the Sun): developing an origin story for close-in hot-Jupiters
involving external binary-star perturbations, contributing theoretical insight to the discoveries of thousands of
planets with NASA's Kepler mission, and describing the dynamical architectures of exoplanetary systems to learn about
their formation and early evolution.
Looking Ahead: The November meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society (CAS) will be on Saturday, November 21, 2026
at the Cernan Earth and Space Center at 5:00 Event Calendar
Membership: If you enjoy the activities of the CAS, please become a member.
Regular membership is only $30 for an individual and $50 for a family membership.
We now accept payment via Zelle.
Join Us!
We would like to thank the Cernan Center and its director Kris McCall for their support of the CAS and
astronomy/science education. We encourage CAS members and all others who support science education to purchase
memberships for the Cernan Center.
We would also like to thank our members for their past and continued support.
We hope that you can attend. Please feel free to forward and invite friends!
Clear Skies!
Tony Harris
V.P. and Program Manager,
Chicago Astronomical Society
