Geneva: Hunting Molecules to Find New Planets

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Geneva: Hunting Molecules to Find New Planets

Post by bystander » Wed Jun 20, 2018 4:14 pm

Hunting Molecules to Find New Planets
University of Geneva | 2018 Jun 19

An international team of astronomers led by UNIGE makes planets visible by detecting molecules on their surface.

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The planet becomes visible when looking for H2O or CO molecules. However, as there
is no CH4 nor NH3 in its atmosphere, it remains invisible when looking for these
molecules, just as its host star which contains none of those four elements. © UNIGE
Each exoplanet revolves around a star, like the Earth around the Sun. This is why it is generally impossible to obtain images of an exoplanet, so dazzling is the light of its star. However, a team of astronomers, led by a researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and member of NCCR PlanetS, had the idea of detecting certain molecules that are present in the planet’s atmosphere in order to make it visible, provided that these same molecules are absent from its star. Thanks to this innovative technique, the device is only sensitive to the selected molecules, making the star invisible and allowing the astronomers to observe the planet directly.

Until now, astronomers could only very rarely directly observe the exoplanets they discovered, as they are masked by the enormous luminous intensity of their stars. Only a few planets located very far from their host stars could be distinguished on a picture, in particular thanks to the SPHERE instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and similar instruments elsewhere. Jens Hoeijmakers, researcher at the Astronomy Department of the Observatory of the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and member of NCCR PlanetS, wondered if it would be possible to trace the molecular composition of the planets. “By focusing on molecules present only on the studied exoplanet that are absent from its host star, our technique would effectively “erase” the star,leaving only the exoplanet,” he explains. ...

Medium-Resolution Integral-Field Spectroscopy for High-Contrast Exoplanet Imaging:
Molecule Maps of the Beta Pictoris System with SINFONI
- H.J. Hoeijmakers et al
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