Sentences with phrase «for dips in brightness»

A transit - watching telescope like Kepler waits for dips in brightness as a planet travels in front of its star and blocks a tiny fraction of its light.

So Jenkins's software searches for dips in brightness lasting up to half a day.

Not exact matches

The transit method of detecting planets that Kepler scientists use involves looking for dips in a star's brightness, caused by a planet blocking a fraction of the starlight (similar to how the moon eclipses the sun).

Among them was Bill Borucki, a space scientist who persuaded nasa to launch a telescope that looks for a 0.01 percent dip in brightness from faraway stars when planets pass in front of them.

Astronomers have identified over 2,300 new planets in Kepler data by searching for tiny dips in a star's brightness when a planet passes in front of it.

Kepler watched sunlike stars for telltale dips in brightness that would reveal a passing planet.

Now he has the sensitive equipment he needs: NASA's Kepler space telescope, which stares at stars and looks for subtle dips in brightness caused by planets crossing in front of the stars and blocking some of their light.

They monitored more than 34,000 stars, searching for slight dips in their brightnesses from the shadows of giant planets crossing in front.

For example, there are lots of stars that cross in front of each other, which causes a similar dip in brightness.

So a number of observational projects have taken a different tack, trying to identify small KBOs by monitoring background stars for sudden dips in brightness that might result from a distant object crossing the line of sight between the star and Earth.

Speculation to account for KIC 8462852's dips in brightness has ranged from it having swallowed a nearby planet to an unusually large group of comets orbiting the star to an alien megastructure.

If the brightness of a star dips slightly for a while and then recovers, that could be the sign of an orbiting planet passing in front of it.

Kepler identifies exoplanets by staring at a large number of stars for extended periods and waiting for their brightness to dip periodically when a planet passes in front of them.

The data for this project will be used to explore ALL possible scenarios to explain the star's dips in brightness.

With its four powerful cameras, it will watch a segment of the sky for 27 days, monitoring stars within that swath for short dips in brightness that might indicate the presence of a planet.

It will monitor the light of these stars, looking out for small dips in brightness.

Stassun is a co-principal investigator on the project and he and his team will be selecting the specific stars that the project will target in its search for subtle, periodic dips in brightness that occurs when a planet transits across a star's face.

The Kepler space telescope watches the same patch of sky - containing around 100,000 stars - and waits for slight «dips» in starlight brightness.

Using the «transit method» to discover exoplanets, the system watches stars for slight dips in their brightness, a sign that an exoplanet orbited in front of its host star.

KIC 8462852 also dips in brightness, but in a much more abnormal way; its brightness will dip by as much as 20 percent for irregular periods of time — anywhere between five to 80 days.

What's so spectacular about WTF's brightness is that there is a single, smooth dip in brightness followed 700 days later by irregular but large decreases that lasted for 100 days before the brightness returned back to normal levels.

Over a two - year period, TESS will hunt for exoplanets with the help of a phenomenon known as transit — where a planet passes in front of its star (from an observer's point of view) causing a periodic and regular dip in brightness.