research a star project

Nonprofit Adopt a Star

An everlasting gift.

All proceeds support the search for Earth-like planets

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Choose from these stellar options:

Adopt a target star.

All target stars have been observed by NASA space telescopes as part of a search for Earth-like planets. Great last-minute gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or Christmas.

Adopt a Double Star

All double stars are two stars in orbit around each other, which appear as a single point of light in the sky. They are perfect gifts for anniversaries, weddings, or Valentine’s Day.

Adopt a Planetary System

These are planet host stars identified in the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Suspected hosts are still waiting to be confirmed, but confirmed hosts have official Kepler or TESS numbers.

Adopt a Bright Star

These are the brightest stars observed by NASA, visible with the unaided eye or using binoculars—no telescope is required. For birthday gifts, get a star in their zodiac sign!

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? Target stars are fainter, and are not available in all constellations. Double stars are popular gifts for anniversaries and weddings. Suspected planet hosts are stars that might have planets around them, while confirmed planet hosts definitely have planets. Bright stars can be seen without a telescope, and are available in every constellation in the sky.

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About nonprofit adopt a star.

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WHO WE ARE: I’m Travis Metcalfe , an astronomer at White Dwarf Research Corporation in Golden, Colorado. I started this nonprofit adopt a star program in 2008 to help raise research funds for the Kepler/TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium , a large international team of scientists. Our work is central to the science goals of the Kepler and TESS missions, but NASA is not allowed to fund international organizations—that’s why we need your support!

WHAT WE DO: NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009. It targeted nearly 200,000 stars in the summer Milky Way, followed by 300,000 stars all around the sky. Some of the stars have planets, and some of those planets pass directly in front of their star. We determine the sizes and ages of these planetary systems by measuring the properties of their host stars. Kepler has stopped collecting new observations, but TESS launched in April 2018 to survey nearly the entire sky. We have a lot of work to do!

WHY CHOOSE US: We are professional astronomers , and this program is run by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization . You can feel confident that your purchase will support cutting-edge research on the stars that you adopt. So adopt a star and support our work! Who knows? Maybe an Earth-like planet will be found around your star—how cool would that be?

HOW IT WORKS: First, click on the type of star that you would like to adopt. By default, you get the brightest star available. If you would like to choose your own star, select one from our database and provide the star number. Next, enter the name or dedication that you would like on your certificate and click the “Add to Cart” button. Finally, click the “Proceed to Checkout” button and complete your payment using a credit card. Within a few minutes, our automated system will send you an email with links to download your certificate and view your star in Google Sky .

Frequently Asked Questions

Only the International Astronomical Union can recognize official names for stars. Any for-profit company that claims otherwise is not being honest. Our Nonprofit Adopt a Star program allows you to attach your name or dedication to a star in our completely transparent public database while supporting the research efforts of a team of astronomers using NASA space telescopes.

All payments are subject to credit card processing fees that are typically a few percent on a $100 payment. After subtracting these fees, the remainder of your payment supports astronomy research. There are no other deductions. You can make additional contributions in any amount through this donation link .

No, all of the stars in our database are the targets of NASA space telescopes that are searching for planets. Each star is unique, and can only be adopted once. When you adopt a star, you receive a link to your individual star page that will always show the name or dedication that you provided. Stars that are already adopted can never be adopted by someone else.

Within a few minutes of your payment, our automated system will process your star adoption and send a message to the email address that you provided during checkout. You should receive a receipt from Nonprofit Adopt a Star immediately following a successful payment, followed by another email a few minutes later with details of your star adoption. If you saw the Thank You page after finishing checkout on our website but didn’t receive one or both emails, please look in your junk email (spam) folder.

Direct links to your certificate and star page are included in the email from Nonprofit Adopt a Star that follows your successful payment. To find your star page, search our database for the name or star number that you provided. To download your certificate, just click on the name that appears next to “Adopted for” on your star page.

The sky coordinates of your adopted star are shown on your star page, on the right side below the Google Sky image. Point to these coordinates to find your star with a computer-controlled telescope. The constellation of your star is shown on the left side below the Google Sky image, and it links to a star chart centered on this constellation. Plot the coordinates on the star chart and refer to the Google Sky image to find your star with a manually-controlled telescope.

We are always happy to help select the right star for your needs, or answer any other questions that you may have about our Nonprofit Adopt a Star program. We can also provide personalized service if you need a larger number of stars for guests at a special event, or members of a corporate team. Please send your email directly to Travis .

Adopt a Star, Help Fund Science

Though it's impossible to own a star, now you can adopt one.

A new program offers people a chance to "adopt"one of the stars in a catalogue of targets where scientists hope to find Earth-likeextrasolar planets.

For $10, members of the public can select a star to adoptfrom the catalogue, and receive an e-mail certificate and updates if anyplanets are discovered around their star. All the money raised goes towardfunding scientific research on the stars.

The stars up for adoption are targets for NASA's Keplerspacecraft , which launched in March on a quest to search for smallterrestrial planets in roughly one-year orbits around other stars. These kindsof planets may be our best chance at finding habitable worlds beyond the solarsystem.

The adopt-a-star program, called the Pale Blue Dot project,is run by a non-profit organization that is not affiliated with or endorsed byNASA. So far, Pale Blue Dot has raised about $10,000 to fund the KeplerAsteroseismic Science Consortium, a project to measure the absolute sizes ofthe stars on Kepler's target list. This endeavor is separate from Kepler's mainmission to hunt for planets, and is not covered by the mission's $600 millionNASA budget.

"The method that Kepler uses to detect planets aroundother stars only tells you the size of the planetcompared to star ," said Travis Metcalfe, an astronomer at the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research in Colorado who leads the adoption project."Our group measures the size of the star."

Using data from Kepler as well as ground-based telescopes,the consortium plans to analyze small oscillations in the stars' light todetermine the stars' densities, masses and radii. The astronomers can use thisinformation to calculate the absolute sizes of any planets around the stars, aswell as the stars' ages, chemical compositions and rotation rates.

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"We are a group of international collaborators who arecontributing to the Kepler mission, but we're not funded by NASA,"Metcalfe told SPACE.com. "The Pale Blue Dot project is part fund-raising,part educational outreach."

When someone adopts a star, it is tagged with the sponsor'sname, both in Google Sky and in a text version of the catalog. The programmakes sure that no two people can adopt the same star.

"We wanted to distinguish ourselves from the phonyname-a-star companies," Metcalfe said. "We also wanted toundercut their prices."

Many companies claim to sell a chance to name a star, butthese are gimmicks. Only the International Astronomical Union (IAU) can bestowofficial names on celestial objects, and most stars only get numbers, notnames. Those naming rights are not sold.

A NASA statement further clarifies, "Any names given tostars through this venture (or planets found) will NOT be recognized either byNASA, the Kepler project or the International Astronomical Union."

• Video - Planet-Hunting Kepler Takes Flight
• Video - NASA's Kepler: Hunting Alien Earths
• The Most Intriguing Extrasolar Planets

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Clara Moskowitz is a science and space writer who joined the Space.com team in 2008 and served as Assistant Managing Editor from 2011 to 2013. Clara has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She covers everything from astronomy to human spaceflight and once aced a NASTAR suborbital spaceflight training program for space missions. Clara is currently Associate Editor of Scientific American. To see her latest project is, follow Clara on Twitter.

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A*Star shake-up: Greater clarity on research funding and outcomes, more collaboration across disciplines

SINGAPORE - Singapore's largest public sector research agency has abandoned its one-size-fits-all approach in funding and judging research, in efforts to stay competitive in an increasingly cut-throat research industry.

In the biggest shake-up in its 16-year history, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) on Tuesday (March 27) announced broad changes to the way the 18 research institutes under its charge will run.

Those who hold hands with industry or provide technologies that support research and development will be guaranteed funding, while those doing purely basic science research will have to work even harder to ensure they survive.

The announcement comes in the face of intensified competition for grants among scientists.

A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh said that scientists will have more clarity on their research funding - although a level of uncertainty will be inherent in competition.

The research institutes, whose work ranges from the biomedical sciences to the physical sciences and engineering, will be organised according to their main activities such as basic science research or industry-oriented projects.

A*Star managing director Raj Thampuran reiterated that the changes are meant to make the agency, which has more than 5,000 employees, more agile in the use of talent and funds.

How R&D activities will be split

Research institutes

Funded through guaranteed core funds. They are industry-oriented research entities, aimed at meeting industry needs and creating new industries

Technology centres Funded through core funds, but to a smaller extent than research institutes. They support research and development efforts within and beyond A*Star.

Knowledge creation Aimed at attracting and hosting top calibre research talent and advancing science. Funded entirely though competitive, merit-based funds. Will be embedded in research institutes and technology centres.

Programmes Funded through competitive, merit-based funds. They bring together multi-disciplinary expertise, from within and outside of A*Star, to address large and complex scientific or technological problems.

National platforms Facilities and expertise that are funded nationally or by multiple public stakeholders, but hosted and managed by A*Star. They serve specific national needs.

Currently, all research institutes are given a core budget - or guaranteed funding - in a similar way. Under the new model, which will kick in from the new financial year that starts next month, they will be funded differently, depending on the nature of their activities.

Researchers looking to collaborate with industry will be given a higher percentage of core or guaranteed funding, while those involved in "knowledge creation", or more upstream research, will need to compete entirely for funding.

Research institutes that provide technologies such as modelling and bioimaging, will receive guaranteed core funds.

When asked, A*Star would not give specifics on funding differences or the fate of individual institutes.

A*Star will also set clearer outcomes for researchers, said Mr Lim. Those working on basic science research will largely not be expected to secure industry partnerships while there will be less emphasis on publishing in scientific journals for those partnering industry.

Scientists' reactions to the changes were mixed.

Professor Hong Wanjin, executive director of the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, said the uncertainty felt by researchers who have to compete more for funding is a global trend. "For those who are just doing knowledge discovery, if you're not able to get grants, they will have to be phased out, that's the reality," he said.

One senior scientist said many researchers remain in the dark about how the changes will affect them. "We already all do a mixture of activities, so why can't they just look at what we've done and fund us accordingly?"

But another A*Star scientist said that evaluating groups that focus on industry collaboration differently from those which do basic science research makes sense. "It is two different jobs. You can't pit butchers against bakers and ask who makes the better bread," he said.

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The STAR Methods way towards reproducibility and open science

The original concept of iScience included the word integrity as one of the 5 “i's” that defined the journal. Truthful to this mission, we have published transparent methods without any length restrictions, to give authors plenty of space to describe what they have done in a reproducible manner. Much has been written about reproducibility (and replicability) in science, especially in recent years, for example by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America . Yet comprehensive standards for reporting across disciplines are still uncommon. Without sufficient disclosure of the details of a research project, the crucial “validation” phase of any open science pipeline is all but bound to result in findings which are not reproducible, and in the frustration and loss of precious time and resources for many researchers at all levels of seniority.

As a multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary, scientific journal team, we feel that it is now time to take our commitment to reproducibility and open science one step further, and to join the life sciences journals within Cell Press in adopting STAR Methods as our format of choice for the Methods section of our articles. We will begin implementing this change from the first of March 2021.

The reason we are making this change is that STAR Methods, simply, works. You can see some of the results of STAR Methods with respect to the reproducibility of Cell Press papers in Menke et al. (2020) . In particular, Figure 2 of that article shows that after adoption of STAR Methods there was a 4-fold jump in the percentage of antibodies which can be uniquely identified. That was not the case for journals which did not adopt STAR Methods or equivalent measures. Promoting usage of resource IDs (RRIDs) is but one of the key aspects of STAR Methods.

A detailed description of the STAR format can be found in our STAR authors guide and it is beyond the scope of this editorial. However, we want to discuss its salient aspects, and what it means for iScience.

One of the most obvious changes to iScience articles will be moving all the Method out of the Supporting Information and into the article itself, where it will be typeset and more prominently featured.

In addition, STAR Methods has three guiding principles, and a structure, which we know improve outcomes. The principles are no length limitations for the methods write-up, the listing in one place (the Key Resources Table) of the important items necessary to reproduce the research results contained in the paper, and the listing of resource IDs for each of them. The structure is exemplified, aside from the Key Resources Table, by the standard headings in which STAR Methods text is always divided:

• 1) Resource availability, with its three subheadings: Lead Contact, Materials Availability, and Data and Code Availability. This part was already required in the previous iScience Methods format. Experimental model and subject details (applicable only for life sciences experimental papers).
• 2) Method details: precise details of all the procedures in the paper, without recurring to “as described earlier” citations, wherever feasible.
• 3) Quantification and statistical analysis.
• 4) Additional resources: links to websites that provide further information relevant to the study.

This is not just a cosmetic change, it is a sea change especially for research outside of the life sciences, where commitment to structured, and reproducible, methods sections are uncommon in the publishing landscape. In particular, STAR Methods introduces the requirement, for researchers in every area, to prominently feature statistical analysis of the work at hand. Statistics are of fundamental importance to have confidence in research in any field. Yet although this has been a requirement broadly accepted and adopted across the life science, this needs to be matched in other disciplines as well. In this regard, as an example, for papers discussing new devices, it will be mandatory to feature results for all devices which were produced during the work (at least three, and certainly more than a “best device” example) and to have at least means and standard deviation of their performance. For specific areas within the physical sciences (solar cells, batteries and catalysis), iScience will further adopt checklists spearheaded by some of our sister journals such as Joule and Chem Catalysis, which will further improve on reporting for these more specific fields.

As in all of our initiatives, we are very interested in the feedback of our authors, referees, and readers, to continuously improve our journal, as well as reproducibility and open science across the board.

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Project STAR Research

Following the development of Project STAR performance tasks protocol in 1996 and the first follow-up study with Project STAR performance task-identified students in 2002, The Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary has just completed a two year research study with Project STAR identified students (the second follow-up study) in 2005. The purpose of this recent study is to analyze Project STAR student identification and performance patterns longitudinally and to study prototypical characteristics of gifted learners of five research prototypes (i.e., low income African American students, low income minority students, low income White students, high nonverbal, low verbal students, and twice-exceptional students) through in-depth interviews.

Based on an analysis of six year's identification profiles:

• Performance task protocols identify more students from low income and African American backgrounds than traditional aptitude and achievement measures.
• Project STAR protocols appear to be identifying more students with uneven profiles with respect to verbal or nonverbal strengths.
• More students from low income minority backgrounds in this study qualified through nonverbal measures than verbal measures.
• Traditionally identified students outperformed performance task-identified students on state assessment test in English language arts and mathematics; however, the differences lacked educational significance (i.e., small effect size).
• Students with uneven identification profiles had achievement pattern consistent with their identification strength dimensions.

Based on an analysis of 37 vignettes of students under five research prototypes:

• Identification and participation gifted programs strengthened students' self-esteem, confidence
• Gifted learners of disadvantaged background tended to be strong-willed, looking forward to a better future via gifted program participation.
• These students, regardless of prototype classification, have clear preference toward one or more subjects.
• These students, more than their parents and teachers, tended to be sensitive to affective and social issues in their school lives.
• Overall, the benefits of identification and programming far outweighed negative consequences of such interventions in the lives of all of these students.

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Overview of the STAR Awards

The NIAMS STAR program provides supplemental funding for early-career stage investigators who have renewed their first NIAMS-funded R01 grant. The supplement enables these scientists to pursue innovative and high-risk research within the broader scope of a current NIAMS-funded, peer-reviewed research project. It also helps investigators to expand a single, structured research project into a broader multi-faceted research program. In FY 2023, one investigator received a NIAMS STAR supplement.

Douglas P. Millay, Ph.D. , is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. Dr. Millay is the principal investigator of a NIAMS-supported  research project to decipher the mechanisms of myoblast fusion —the process in which muscle precursor cells fuse together to form muscle fibers. Previously, the team had discovered that two proteins called myomaker and myomerger are essential for this process and that they drive fusion through distinct cell membrane remodeling activities. The STAR award will enable the researchers to identify additional novel factors that regulate fusion in skeletal muscle tissue. The findings from this research will provide unique insight into the essential process for muscle formation and regeneration, in the context of both normal development and chronic muscle diseases. 

For more information about the NIAMS STAR program, including the funding opportunity announcement and profiles of past award recipients, visit the Supplements to Advance Research (STAR) page on the NIAMS website. Additional background information is provided in the  December 2014 letter from the NIAMS Director announcing the program .

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Here's what NASA will study during the total solar eclipse

NASA has funded at least five research projects during the upcoming total solar eclipse .

Why it matters: The observations will help researchers understand the myriad ways the Sun influences Earth and the life upon it.

✈️ Chasing the eclipse with NASA's high-altitude research planes:

• Teams led by Southwest Research Institute will take pictures of the eclipse while flying NASA research aircraft to study dust or asteroids that may orbit our star.
• The research jets will also carry instruments from a University of Hawaii-led team to gain insights into the sun's corona and coronal mass ejections.

📻 Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation:

• A University of Scranton-led initiative will invite ham radio operators around the country to send and receive signals to one another before, during and after the eclipse and to record how strong their signals are and how far they travel.
• The initiative hopes to observe how the eclipse affects the ionosphere, a part of Earth's upper atmosphere that's critical for radio communications and navigational systems.

☀️ SuperDARN:

• Using the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network , researchers led by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will study how solar radiation impacts the ionosphere, which could give insights into space weather.

🔭 GAVRT Solar Patrol:

• Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Lewis Center for Education Research will use the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope to measure subtle changes in solar radio emissions as the Moon eclipses active regions of the Sun.

🚀 Atmospheric Perturbations around the eclipse path:

• A University in Daytona Beach-led team will launch a succession of three rockets from eastern Virginia before, during and after the eclipse to measure electric, magnetic, temperature and density changes in Earth's upper atmosphere.

👩‍💼 Citizen science:

• NASA has also funded three massive citizen science investigations that will be conducted by hundreds of volunteers across the country.

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At A*STAR, our deep research capabilities and cross-domain technologies are helping to drive innovation and advance scientific knowledge, in collaboration with academia, industry and fellow public agencies. Find out more about our different research focuses by clicking on the buttons below.

A*STAR celebrates International Women's Day

From groundbreaking discoveries to cutting-edge research, our researchers are empowering the next generation of female science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leaders. Get inspired by our #WomeninSTEM