Sentences with phrase «brightness dips»

An eclipse within the background binary would mimic a small brightness dip in Kepler - 20.

If they were nearly the same, this would suggest that the cause was something opaque, like an orbiting disk, planet, or star, or even large structures in space» said Wright, who is a co-author of the paper, titled «The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC 8462852.»

But with needle - in - haystack projects, I always wonder whether they saw nothing because there was nothing to detect or because they missed the rare and transient brightness dips that small KBOs would cause.»

Using additional observations from the 10 - meter Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and from the 5 - meter Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain in California, Johnson and his team could also confirm that the observed brightness dips were indeed due to planets.

Kepler had already seen periodic brightness dips in the faint light of the red dwarf star, but astronomers had not yet been able to rule out other possible explanations.

They can detect brightness dips as small as 1 %, which is sufficient to find giant gaseous planets that are like our own Jupiter and Saturn.

When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star, the star's brightness dips slightly.

Kepler scientists are interested in the brief moments when a star's brightness dips — the telltale shadow of a planet passing in front.

Other features of the transit — its duration, how much light is blocked, and how quickly the brightness dips — provide additional details such as the planet's diameter.

Even though the reality was much different, the fact remained that the brightness dips that have been observed around KIC 8462852 were as high as 22 percent (much too high to have been caused by any transiting planets) and very chaotic in nature, giving credence to the notion that they could have indeed been the result of alien astro - engineering on a very large scale.