Andrew Langley - Planet Hunting: Racking Up Data and Looking for Life
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- Book:Planet Hunting: Racking Up Data and Looking for Life
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Look up at the night sky. How many planets do you think are out there? You can see five planets without a telescopeMercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Including Earth, there are eight planets in our around the sun.
Because Earth orbits around it, our sun gets a lot of attention. But there are billions of suns in the universe. A sun is any star that has its own solar system of planets orbiting it. Many of the stars we see in the sky can also be suns. Scientists think there are trillions of planets in space. We call the planets outside our solar system . Scientists are just beginning to learn about them.
From Earth, only five planets are visible. Scientists think there are trillions of planets in the universe.
There are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy.
For centuries, exoplanets existed. But they couldnt prove it. Telescopes were not strong enough to see that far into space.
Then a great breakthrough came in 1995. For the first time, a planet was discovered orbiting a sunlike star. Scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found this exoplanet by using images and information from the Haute-Provence Observatory in southeast France. The new planet was named 51 Pegasi b. Later the name was changed to Dimidium.
Scientists think Dimidium (lower right) has one side that always faces its star.
Since then scientists have tracked down nearly 4,000 exoplanets. But this is just the beginning. There are many more exoplanets to find. Scientists are building new and more complex telescopes. Some will be on Earth, while others will be launched into space.
Hunting for planets takes a lot of money. The Kepler Space Telescope cost more than $600 million. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will cost at least $3.2 billion. WFIRST is set to launch into space in the mid-2020s.
Scientists believe there could be billions of planets that are similar to Earth.
But the cost is well worth it. If scientists look in the right place, they could find another planet like Earth. But finding a planet like ours wont be easy. It has to have enough water and breathable air to support life. Scientists havent found a planet like that yet.
What does an exoplanet need to have to be considered an Earth-like planet?
Location, location, location. The planet has to be in the right place. It cant be too close to its sun, because it will be too hot for life to exist. If its too far away, the planet will be too cold.
Just right. The planet has to be about the same size as Earth. It also needs an Earth-sized to protect it from harmful radiation.
Water, water everywhere. The planet needs to have a source of water for life to survive.
From 2009 to 2018, the Kepler Space Telescope discovered more than 2,300 exoplanets.
Scientists find most exoplanets with the transit method. In this method, scientists use telescopes to closely watch groups of stars. The telescopes identify any exoplanets that cross, or transit, between Earth and a star.
Planets are tiny compared to stars. Even powerful telescopes cant actually see them. The planet blocks some of a stars light as it crosses. The star looks dimmer. The longer the transit lasts, the farther away the exoplanet is.
Scientists have discovered more than 3,000 exoplanets using the transit method. But the method does have its disadvantages. For example, a distant planet has to pass directly between the star and Earth for this method to be successful. Some exoplanets will never do this. That is why scientists use other methods to find exoplanets too.
Scientists use the transit method to locate exoplanets orbiting their stars.
By using the wobble method, scientists can find out the size of an exoplanet. Bigger planets cause the stars around them to wobble more than smaller planets.
Scientists find some keeps planets in orbit around their sun. Planets have a gravitational pull too. This pull appears to slightly move, or wobble, the planets sun.
Scientists use powerful to pick up these tiny wobbles. As the exoplanet orbits its sun, the spectrograph monitors the suns light waves. These waves are squeezed together when the sun moves closer to us. When it moves farther away, the waves stretch out. This makes the sun seem to wobble.
Scientists use the wobble method to detect an exoplanet near its star.
Using powerful telescopes, scientists can see stars that are billions of miles away. Stars send out bright rays that telescopes can detect. But exoplanets are different. They are small, dark, and produce very little light of their own. Scientists can see an exoplanet only when light from a nearby star reflects off the planets surface.
But this can cause another problem. Stars create large amounts of light. The glare from this light can make it impossible to detect a tiny planet in the darkness.
NASAs Kepler Space Telescope observed sunlike stars and planets during its mission.
How do scientists avoid a stars bright glare when searching for exoplanets? One way is direct imaging. This method allows astronomers to pick up the dim light coming from the exoplanet itself. Scientists use a coronagraph in this method. This small mask is placed inside the telescope. The mask blocks out most of the starlight that comes in. The exoplanet is then visible.
Not all solar systems are the same. Space telescopes have found some unusual ones. For example, the Kepler 64b solar system has one planet that orbits around two suns. Two more suns orbit around those suns.
Starshades can also be used. NASAs flower-shaped starshade unfolds like a giant umbrella in space. The starshade is placed between the telescope and a stars bright light. This lets the telescope take pictures of the actual exoplanet.
A starshade blocks light from a star so that a telescope can study exoplanets.
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