Sentences with phrase «detect fainter planets»

Not exact matches

Many of the cluster stars are fainter than those normally targeted for exoplanet searches and trying to detect the weak signal from possible planets pushed HARPS to the limit.

Previous sky surveys with ground - based telescopes have mainly detected giant planets, while NASA's Kepler observatory has uncovered the existence of many smaller exoplanets, but their host stars are faint and difficult to study.

«We focused on red - dwarf stars, which are smaller and fainter than our Sun, since we expect any biomarker signals from planets orbiting such stars to be easier to detect.»

Planets are so faint and tiny compared to their host stars that it is remarkable we can detect them at all, let alone study their atmospheres.

It is the first planet detected by the Gemini Planet Imager, or GPI, which was designed to discover and analyze faint, young planets orbiting bright, nearby planet detected by the Gemini Planet Imager, or GPI, which was designed to discover and analyze faint, young planets orbiting bright, nearby Planet Imager, or GPI, which was designed to discover and analyze faint, young planets orbiting bright, nearby stars.

While NASA's Kepler space observatory has discovered thousands of planets, it does so indirectly by detecting a loss of starlight as a planet passes in front of its star, the Gemini Planet Imager was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright planet passes in front of its star, the Gemini Planet Imager was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright Planet Imager was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars.

The findings were headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics at Stanford University, and show the new planet, 51 Eridani b, is one million times fainter than its parent star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, which should yield additional clues as to how the planet formed.

Because planets are much fainter than the stars they orbit, extrasolar planets are extremely difficult to detect directly.

While NASA's Wide - field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) failed to the tell - tale warmth of gas giants like Saturn within 10,000 AUs and larger than Jupiter objects out to 26,000 AUs (NASA / JPL news release), an icy «super-Earth», would have been too cold and faint for WISE to detect — even if the hypothesized planet has a small internal heat source and absorbs some sunlight.