At EVE Fanfest 2017, it was announced that that players of MMO EVE Online will soon be joining the great exoplanet hunt too through an interesting new mini-game that challenges players to find elusive
planetary transits in data from telescopes around the world.
Not exact matches
To avoid being fooled, Kepler must be able to distinguish between natural variations
in a star's light and the dimming caused by
planetary transits.
In particular, they are looking at the planet as it
transits, seeking a telltale broadening of its
planetary shadow due to starlight being absorbed by a hydrogen - rich atmosphere.
Three years later Charbonneau found himself locked
in a race with Deming to be the first to detect the flip side of a
planetary transit — the moment, called secondary eclipse, when a planet passes behind its star.
Fridlund helped design COROT (for convection, rotation, and
planetary transits), ESA's early entry
in the race to find rocky, Earth - like planets outside our solar system.
What the search for
planetary transits has
in common with the observation of starquakes is the need to stare at the same stars for a long time — long enough to detect very slow vibrations or to detect at least three
transits of a planet.
This was borne out by his first voyage
in 1768 on the Endeavour with James Cook, who was to observe the
transit of Venus across the face of the Sun from the southern hemisphere to help to calculate
planetary distances, while Banks collected biological specimens, the first from the South Pacific to be seen
in England.
It was looking for
planetary «
transits,»
in which fortuitously aligned worlds cross the face of their host stars and block a fraction of the starlight seen from Earth.
To confirm that the
transits of COROT 9 b recorded
in 2008 by the COROT satellite were indeed
planetary, the researchers first took two follow - up readings of the star using a spectrograph
in France, a rough sketch that was consistent with the presence of a planet.
The few known super-Earths whose orbits are fortuitously aligned so that they
transit — pass
in front of their host star — from Earth's vantage point provide a unique laboratory for
planetary investigations.
Bean tracked GJ 1214 b through two of those
planetary transits using one of the 8.2 - meter telescopes at the Very Large Telescope atop Cerro Paranal
in Chile, parsing the observed light into its individual wavelengths.
It spends much of its time monitoring the light from around 60 of the nearest ultracool dwarf stars and brown dwarfs («stars» which are not quite massive enough to initiate sustained nuclear fusion
in their cores), looking for evidence of
planetary transits.
To pick out those signals associated with actual planets, physics graduate student Roberto Sanchis - Ojeda searched through the set of periodic light curves, looking for frequent smaller dips
in the data midway between the
planetary transits.
Having so many worlds
in one system — and so many planets that spill their secrets via
transits — may provide an exceptional test bed for theories of
planetary formation and evolution.
«You can see that this is an indirect method,» Maciejewski says, acknowledging that others have claimed
planetary detections by
transit timing
in the past, only to have other astronomers rule out the purported finds.
The
transit zone is rich
in host stars for
planetary systems, offering approximately 100,000 potential targets, each potentially orbited by habitable planets and moons, the scientists say — and that's just the number we can see with today's radio telescope technologies.
If an exoplanet passes
in front of a star (called a
planetary transit), it blocks a portion of the light and causes the brightness to dip.
One method that has been discussed for years but has yet to bear fruit is known as
transit timing — if a planet passes
in front of its host star so that it blocks out a small but detectable fraction of the star's light, researchers can time the arrival of that partial eclipse, known as a
planetary transit.
Coming hot off the heels of discoveries made by other observatories, including NASA's Kepler and CoRot (the Convection, Rotation, and
Planetary Transits mission, led by France's CNES with contributions from the ESA), this spacecraft is intended to build significantly on our knowledge of the universe, the Solar System, and the formation of life
in general.
In 1996, two teams of astronomers announced the possible detection of a
planetary transit eclipse of the close binary pair CM Draconis Aab (Guinan et al, 1998; Martin and Deeg, 1996; and Guinan et al, 1996).
All of the potentially Earth - like worlds were spotted using the
transit method, which measures dips
in a star's light output as a
planetary body crosses
in front from our line of sight.
In 1996, two teams of astronomers announced the possible detection of a
planetary transit eclipse of the close binary pair CM Draconis Aab, which has yet to be confirmed (further details below).
The expected Doppler signals are too small to confirm them by demonstrating that their masses are
in the
planetary regi... ▽ More We present an investigation of twelve candidate
transiting planets from Kepler with orbital periods ranging from 34 to 207 days, selected from initial indications that they are small and potentially
in the habitable zone (HZ) of their parent stars.
Transit signals detected
in 2013 observations indicate that
planetary candidate c could be an Earth - sized planet with a year lasting no more than 20.4 days, putting it slightly further out than Bb but still scorchingly close to the star (Demory et al, 2015; and Jacob Aron, New Scientist, March 27, 2015).
Combined with an estimate of the stellar den... ▽ More We present the discovery of the Kepler - 20
planetary system, which we initially identified through the detection of five distinct periodic
transit signals
in the Kepler light curve of the host star 2MASSJ19104752 +4220194.
The initial
transit signal was identified
in KELT - North survey data, and the
planetary nature of the occulter was established using a combination of follow - up photometry, high - resolution imaging, high - resolution spectroscopy, and precise radial velocity measurements.
For Kepler - 20c and Kepler - 20d, the blend scenario is independently disfavored by the achromaticity of the
transit: From Spitzer data gathered at 4.5 um, we infer a ratio of the
planetary to stellar radii of 0.075 + -0.015 (Kepler - 20c) and 0.065 + -0.011 (Kepler - 20d), consistent with each of the depths measured
in the Kepler optical bandpass.
Abstract: We present the discovery of the Kepler - 20
planetary system, which we initially identified through the detection of five distinct periodic
transit signals
in the Kepler light curve of the host star 2MASSJ19104752 +4220194.
We identified the initial
transit signal
in the KELT - North survey data and established the
planetary nature of the companion through precise follow - up photometry, high - resolution spectroscopy, precise radial velocity measurements, and high - resolution adaptive optics imaging.
We combine the estimate of Teff and [Fe / H] with an estimate o... ▽ More We present the discovery of the Kepler - 19
planetary system, which we first identified from a 9.3 - day periodic
transit signal
in the Kepler photometry.
Abstract: We present the discovery of the Kepler - 19
planetary system, which we first identified from a 9.3 - day periodic
transit signal
in the Kepler photometry.
Orbital stability provides upper limits for the masses of the
transiting companions that are
in the
planetary regime.
The
planetary system was named TRAPPIST - 1 after The
Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST)
in Chile.
Solutions for stellar parallax and proper motions await more observations, but the analysis of the astrometric residuals from a local solution
in the vicinity of a star have already proved to be an important tool
in the process of confirming the hypothesis of a
planetary transit.
We detected the
transit light - curve signature
in the course of the TrES multi-site
transiting planet survey, and confirmed the
planetary nature of the companion via multicolor photometry and precise radial velocity measurements.
The dilution of the host star's light by the nearly equal magnitude stellar companion (~ 0.5 magnitudes fainter) significantly affects the derived
planetary parameters, and if left uncorrected, leads to an underestimate of the radius and mass of the planet by 10 %... ▽ More We present the discovery of a hot Jupiter
transiting an F star
in a close visual (0.3» sky projected angular separation) binary system.
On December 16, 2009, a team of astronomers (including David Charbonneau, Zachory K. Berta, Jonathan Irwin, Christopher J. Burke, Philip Nutzman, Lars A. Buchhave, Christophe Lovis, Xavier Bonfils, David W. Latham, Stéphane Udry, Ruth A. Murray - Clay, Matthew J. Holman, Emilio E. Falco, Joshua N. Winn, Didier Queloz, Francesco Pepe, Michel Mayor, Xavier Delfosse, and Thierry Forveille) announced the discovery of a planet «b» of 6.55 ± 0.98 Earth - masses
in a tight inner orbit using the «
transit method» of
planetary detection using «a fleet of ground - based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have
in their backyards» as part of the MEarth Project (CfA news release).
On December 16, 2009, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of a super-Earth
in an inner orbit using the «
transit method» of
planetary detection using «a fleet of ground - based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have
in their backyards» as part of the MEarth Project (CfA news release).
On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, NASA's Kepler Mission revealed that, thus far, it has detected 1,235
planetary candidates orbiting 907 host stars, from a survey of some 155,453 stars
in constellations Cygnus and Lyra using the
transit method which requires a rare orbital alignment across the face of the host star as seen from the Solar System.
We present a study of the
planetary systems WASP - 45 and WASP - 46, both composed of a main - sequence star and a close -
in hot Jupiter, based on 29 new high - quality light curves of
transits events.
The 16
planetary candidates have estimated diameters within range of being super-Earths (1.26 to 2.0 times Earth's diameter), given error margins ranging from 25 to 35 percent due to the uncertainty
in the size of their host star and of the «depth» of the observed
transits (decrease
in stellar luminosity) across the surface of the star.
Future exoplanet missions like NASA's
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and European Space Agency's CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) and
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO - 2.0) missions will bring
in even more data than Kepler and help us fill out the ranks of small habitable zone planets.
May 15, 2018, is a BIG day
in the stars, as the year's only new moon
in earthy Taurus arrives alongside another major
planetary transit: Uranus exits Aries and enters the Bull's pen for the first time since 1942.