GSFC: Finding New Worlds with a Play of Light and Shadow

[bystander]

Finding New Worlds with a Play of Light and Shadow
NASA | Goddard Space Flight Center | 2015 Oct 30

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBU1yFbGHB8[/youtube][c]Looking for the Shadows of New Worlds - Credits: NASA/GSFC/SVS
NASA Goddard astrophysicist Daniel Angerhausen discusses how astronomers may be
able to maximize transit photometry to find planets like those in our solar system
around other stars -- and possibly moons, rings, and asteroid groups as well.[/c]

Astronomers have used many different methods to discover planets beyond the solar system, but the most successful by far is transit photometry, which measures changes in a star's brightness caused by a mini-eclipse. When a planet crosses in front of its star along our line of sight, it blocks some of the star's light. If the dimming lasts for a set amount of time and occurs at regular intervals, it likely means an exoplanet is passing in front of, or transiting, the star once every orbital period.

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has used this technique to become the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than a thousand established discoveries and many more awaiting confirmation. Missions carrying improved technology are now planned, but how much more can they tell us about alien planetary systems similar to our own? ...

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are building on Kepler's success. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scheduled to launch no later than 2018, will be the first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey. Over the course of two years, TESS will monitor some 200,000 nearby stars for telltale transits. ESA's Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) satellite, which is expected to begin a six-year mission in 2024, will search for planets around roughly a million stars spread over half the sky. ...

Photometry's bright future: Detecting Solar System analogues with future space telescopes - Michael Hippke, Daniel Angerhausen

• Astrophysical Journal 810(1):29 (2015 Sep 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/810/1/29
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1503.03251 > 11 Mar 2015 (v1), 08 Jul 2015 (v2)

A statistical search for a population of Exo-Trojans in the Kepler dataset - Michael Hippke, Daniel Angerhausen

• Astrophysical Journal 811(1):1 (2015 Sep 20) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/811/1/1
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1508.00427 > 03 Aug 2015