Exoplanet Discovery

You Can Help Make The Next Great Exoplanet Discovery From Your Laptop

... just by looking at the HIRES data and learning how to interpret it. For those interested, Yale professor Greg Laughlin has written a tutorial on how to do this, which is available on his website. “It opens up a great chance to teach the public about searching for planets,” Burt said. “It also provides information to other exoplanet teams working at other large observatories, because to find planets that are either very small or [in] very long periods you need hundreds of data points.”. Basically, it’s the people’s data now and we’re all better for it, even if that ruffles a few academic elitists’ feathers. “We’re trying to move toward a more community-focused aspect, where different teams can combine their resources and really take this science to the next level, instead of carefully hoarding and protecting their data,” Burt said. So, just to make the snobs extra mad one more time, this data set means anyone can be an exoplanet hunter. “Exactly,” Burt ...

Exoplanet Discovery Nedir? Google’dan Sürpriz Doodle

... benzeri 7 gezegen keşfetti. Bu keşif gezegenlerin nasıl oluştuğuna dair önemli bilgiler sağlayacak. Bilim insanları bu yıldız sistemini bir gezegen hazinesi olarak tanımlıyorlar. NASA gezegen bilimi açısından son yılların en büyük keşfini açıkladı. Dünya'mıza yaklaşık 40 ışık yılı uzaklıkta küçük bir yıldız çevresinde yaşama uygun bölgede ve Dünya gezegenin büyüklüğünde 7 gezegen keşfetti. Astronomlar daha önce de 7 gezegen barındıran yıldız sistemleri keşfetmişlerdi ama ilk defa bu kadar çok Dünya ile benzer büyüklükte gezegen barındıran hem de sadece 12 parsel yani 39 ışık yılı uzaklıkta bir sistem keşfediliyor. NASA'dan astrofizikçi Elisa Quintana bu yıldız sisteminin inanılmaz olduğunu ve yakınlarındaki yıldızların da benzer gezegenlere ev sahipliği yapıyor olabileceğini belirtiyor. TRAPPER-1 YILDIZI VE ÇEVRESİNDEKİ GEZEGENLER MERCEK ALTINDA. Trapper-1 adındaki bu küçük yıldız komik skalada Dünya'ya ...

Newly Discovered Network Of Planets Could Harbor Water And Life, Scientists Say

... derived its name from its appearance in a drawing made by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844, using a 36-inch telescope. The composed image was assembled from 24 individual Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. A Hubble panoramic view of the Orion Nebula reveals thousands of stars. The Hubble telescope captured this display of starlight, glowing gas and silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center. This image shows the Orion nebula in an explosion of infrared, ultraviolet and visible-light colors. It was "painted" by hundreds of baby stars on a canvas of gas and ...

Astronomers Discover 7 Earth-sized Planets 40 Light-years Away

... to really confirming if any of these planets resemble Earth and could foster life — terrestrial or alien — is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to study the atmospheres of these distant worlds. That could change with the new generation of instruments being constructed right now, like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope. Developing more technology that can pinpoint the present of biosignatures, like methane and oxygen, is critical to the search for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life. “You really have to wait till we can assess the atmospheres” before making conclusions about life, explained Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT. And part of that means just hoping for optimal conditions in order to make such observations. “We have the capability to find signs of life elsewhere, but nature has to deliver.”. When those ...

Seven Earth-sized Worlds Found Orbiting One Ultra-cool Star

... have made some incredible discoveries there. TRAPPIST-1 itself is a tiny star, only around 10 per cent the size of the Sun, that is much cooler and much redder than our home star. Based on this, astronomers informally refer to it as an "ultra-cool red dwarf" star. That alone makes this celestial body somewhat noteworthy, but what's truly remarkable is what's orbiting around it. In May of 2016, astronomers reported finding three rocky planets circling very close to this star, each roughly the same size as Earth. A campaign of observations since then, however, has turned up much, much more. As of today, February 22, 2017, TRAPPIST-1 is now the home of seven different exoplanets: six rocky worlds, TRAPPIST-1 b, -1 c, -1 d, -1 e, -1 f, and -1 h, all of which are roughly Earth-sized, and a seventh, TRAPPIST-1 g, that is probably a watery (or icy) world. Even more amazing, though, is the fact that at three of these worlds - TRAPPIST-1 e, 1 f, and 1 g - are in orbits where they could be the right temperature to support oceans of liquid water on their surface. Artist's impressions of TRAPPIST-1 and the seven known ...

Nasa Reveals Their Discovery Of Seven Exoplanets Around Dwarf Star

... sun as Mars. Trappist-1 G is the largest planet in the habitable zone with a radius 13 percent larger than Earth’s. It also gets the same amount of starlight as Mars and our asteroid belt. This information comes largely from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The panelists reporting their findings are. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium. Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California. Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. [Image Source: NASA TV Public-Education ]. For comparison, the team juxtaposed a basketball and a golf ball to show the difference between our sun and Trappist-1. The ...

How Nasa Keeps Track Of Alien Worlds

... sure they're not flukes in the data. Most of the planets aren't directly imaged but rather detected via their effects on their parent stars, and confirmations can come from observation by various methods or by a strong pattern of "transits" across their stars. Five confirmed exoplanets pack together orbiting the system Kelpler-80 in this artist's illustration. The first was discovered transiting its star in 2013. Credit: Illustration by Karl Tate, __link__. The archive also hosts data about the stars' light curves when they're available, showing their brightening and dimming, as well as Kepler data that has not been confirmed as a planet's signature. It keeps a list of false positives, too, and the list is always in flux; additions and changes in status are implemented continuously. "Things can go in and then come back out," Akeson said. "And I think in one case, something went in, came out and has gone back in. There's this series of papers in the literature — basically two groups arguing with each other via the papers — whether or not this is the planet signature versus another kind of signature.". An exoplanet's data is officially added only once it appears in a ...

Nasa Just Discovered 7 Earth-sized Exoplanets, 3 In The Habitable Zone Of A Dwarf Star

... environments, places that are conducive to life,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a press release. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”. The exoplanets were discovered around TRAPPIST-1, an ultra-cool dwarf star 235 trillion miles from Earth. Compared to our Sun, TRAPPIST-1 is small and cold, making the habitable zone much closer to the star. Thus, the planets orbit very close to the star and close to each other. By using data collected by Spitzer, the team was able to measure the exact size of the seven exoplanets, while making estimates of the mass and density of six of these. The measurements suggest that all of them are likely rocky. More:  Kepler finds 104 exoplanets in the largest single haul of confirmed planets. “The seven wonders of TRAPPIST-1 are the first Earth-size planets that have been found orbiting this kind of star,” said Michael Gillon, lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the ...

More Alien Worlds? New Data Haul Identifies 100+ Possible Exoplanets

... to be a workhorse instrument of the field," study co-author Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "I am very happy to contribute to science that is fundamentally changing how we view ourselves in the universe," added Vogt, who designed and built HIRES. [ Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets ]. HIRES detects exoplanets using the "radial velocity" method: The instrument picks up the tiny gravitational wobbles that orbiting worlds induce in their parent stars. This strategy is different from that employed by the most prolific planet hunter of all time, NASA's Kepler space telescope ; Kepler watches for the tiny brightness dips caused when a planet crosses its star's face — called the "transit method.". In the new study, the researchers identified 60 so-called planet candidates, as well as 54 other suggestive signals that require further investigation before they can be elevated to candidate status. One of the official candidates circles the star GJ 411 (also known as Lalande 21185), which lies just 8.3 light-years from the sun. Only three star systems are closer. (The three-star Alpha Centauri is the nearest system to the sun. Last ...

Water Detected In The Atmosphere Of Hot Jupiter Exoplanet 51 Pegasi B

... in characteristics to the solar system's biggest planet, with a mass of about 0.47 Jupiter masses. It has high surface temperature, as it orbits its parent star 51 Pegasi very closely—at a distance of about 0.05 AU. To better characterize this planetary system, a team of astronomers led by Jayne Birkby have observed 51 Pegasi and its planet with the CRyogenic high-resolution Infra Red Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. They obtained a total of 42 spectra allowing them to observe the radial-velocity shift of the water features in the planet's day side atmosphere. "We have presented a 5,6 σ detection of water molecules in the atmosphere of the original hot Jupiter, 51 Peg b, providing the first confirmation that the 51 Peg Ab system is a double-lined spectroscopic binary. (…) The best-matching model to the planet spectra from ...