About ten years after it was launched, NASA's Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft was shut down. Over 5,000 candidate exoplanets and 2,662 confirmed exoplanets were detected using the transit method. Scientists are trying to uncover more planets in the data.
A team of researchers have announced the discovery of a planet that is nearly a twin of Jupiter.
The planet is 17,000 light-years away. That is almost twice as far away as the next furthest planet discovered. Its mass is similar to Jupiter and it is at the same distance from the Sun. The world was found in the data.
The transit timing method was used to find planets. This one was discovered differently. One of Einstein's predictions was that huge objects can bend light. It is called gravitational microlensing.
“The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against.”
Dr. Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
There is a new paper about thepler K2 campaign. The discovery is the first space-based one. It is available online at the pre-print site arxiv.org and hasn't been peer-reviewed yet. David Specht is a student at The University of Manchester.
Between April and July of 2016 there were more opportunities to detect exoplanets with microlensing. Astronomers use the microlensing technique to watch for light from a background star bent by an exoplanet. It is not easy to align the background and foreground from the point of view of the astronomer.
To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star, according to Dr. Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council grant that funded this research. So he sat and watched them for three months.
A team of researchers developed a new method to find microlensing candidates. Some of the same researchers are behind the new study. The researchers created a tool to find free-floating planet candidates. They found five new candidates, including one that was consistent with a bound planet.
Even though NASA didn't explicitly design the mission for microlensing, this result highlights the advantages of finding planets outside our solar system.
A new study confirms the candidacy of the one exoplanet candidate found in the previous study. Each planet has a data point that tells scientists something.
The same sky area was looked at by five ground-based surveys. The microlensing anomaly was spotted before they did because they were over 100 million km away. Researchers were able to get a better idea of where they were seeing it after the delay.
The difference in vantage point between the two allowed us to triangulate where the planetary system is located.
Dr. Kerins said that it was possible to determine the mass of the exoplanet and its distance from its host star with the help of the weather or daylight.
Microlensing is the main method for detecting cool, low-mass exoplanets. The transit method has a built-in sampling bias that makes it more likely to detect giant planets close to large stars. Astronomers need multiple transits to confirm exoplanet candidates because the transit method can take hundreds of years for multiple transits to occur. The same limitations are not present in giltational microlensing.
Our understanding of solar system architecture and theories of planet formation can be strengthened by detecting planets like 2-2016-BLG-0005Lb beyond a solar system. Current thinking shows that high-mass planets form through core accretion beyond the snow line. Some may form due to instability. Jupiter probably did that, and other planets may not. The process explains the high numbers of hot Jupiters.
Lower-mass planets should exist in large numbers beyond the snow line, but they do not typically migrate from their formation, according to the authors.
We can test planet-formation predictions directly without considering complex migration dynamics.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
