Sentences with phrase «slight dimming»

What a run it was: For about four years, the Kepler space telescope watched more than 100,000 stars, looking for very slight dimming — a sign that a planet had crossed in front.

Astronomers detected the planets using the Kepler telescope, which measures the slight dimming of a star's light caused by orbiting planets passing in front of it.

Both Kepler and TESS are designed to scan the sky for planetary transits, the slight dimming that occurs when a planet moves across the face of a star and temporarily blocks some of its glow.

More recently — especially since the 2009 launch of the Kepler Space Telescope — they have relied on the slight dimming in luminosity that occurs as a planet passes in front of its star, blocking a bit of its light.

The Kepler spacecraft, launched last March, orbits the sun while scanning upward of 150,000 stars for signs of a slight dimming — a sign that a planet has crossed its face.

The two methods of detecting extrasolar planets, nicknamed «wobble and blink,» involve plotting tiny shifts in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of its orbiting planets, and catching the slight dimming in a star's light that occurs whenever a planet passes between the star and an observer's telescope.

Most of the exoplanets discovered so far were spotted using the transit method: watching for the slight dimming of the star when a planet crosses in front of it.

The telescopes look for the slight dimming of distant stars that occurs as Kuiper belt objects momentarily pass in front of them.

This slight dimming effect is known as a «transit» and when four transits are detected by Kepler, the announcement of a confirmed exoplanet can be made.

Since then, researchers have tried to verify the planet's existence using transits — a slight dimming in the star as the planet passes by — but haven't found additional, conclusive evidence.

But the planet is actually cooling because less heat is coming in since the Sun is in a slight dimming period.