Getting Closer! --Kepler Mission Captures 41 New Planets in 20 Star Systems

Getting Closer! --Kepler Mission Captures 41 New Planets in 20 Star Systems
Getting Closer! --Kepler Mission Captures 41 New Planets in 20 Star SystemsThe Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy  « "99% of the Mass of the Visible Universe Not Explained by CERN's Discovery of Higgs Boson" |Main| "Cerataspis Monstrosa" --200 Year Old Deep-Sea Mystery Solved »

August 27, 2012 Getting Closer! --Kepler Mission Captures 41 New Planets in 20 Star Systems

 

          

 

Two newly submitted studies verify 41 new transiting planets in 20 star systems. These results may increase the number of Kepler's confirmed planets by more than 50 percent: to 116 planets hosted in 67 systems, over half of which contain more than one planet. The papers are currently under scientific peer-review.

Nineteen of the newly validated planetary systems have two closely spaced transiting planets and one system has three. Five of the systems are common to both of these independent studies. The planets range from Earth-size to more than seven times the radius of Earth, but generally orbit so close to their parent stars that they are hot, inhospitable worlds. The planets were confirmed by analyzing Transit Timing Variations (TTVs).

In closely packed systems, the gravitational pull of the planets causes the acceleration or deceleration of a planet along its orbit. These "tugs" cause the orbital period of each planet to change from one orbit to the next. TTV demonstrates that two transiting planet candidates are in the same system and that their masses are planetary in nature.

"These systems, with their large gravitational interactions, give us important clues about how planetary systems form and evolve," said lead researcher Jason Steffen, the Brinson postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill. "This information helps us understand how our own solar system fits into the population of all planetary systems." The two research teams used data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets.

"The sheer volume of planet candidates being identified by Kepler is inspiring teams to look at the planet confirmation and characterization process differently. This TTV confirmation technique can be applied to large numbers of systems relatively quickly and with little or no follow-up observations from the ground," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "Perhaps the bottleneck between identifying planet candidates and confirming them just got a little wider."

The diagram below shows the newly submitted transiting planets in green along with the unconfirmed planet candidates in the same system in violet. The systems are ordered horizontally by increasing Kepler number and KOI designation and vertically by orbital period.

 

          

 

More information: see: J Steffen et al, 2012, Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: VII; and, Ji-Wei Xie, 2012, Transit Timing Variation of Near-Resonant KOI Pairs.

The Daily Galaxy via Provided by NASA Kepler Mission

Posted at 08:44 AM | Permalink

Comments

Good work! Find us a suitable planet so we can get off this rock.

Posted by:Bigfan |August 28, 2012 at 03:08 AM

It'd be nice if we could enlarge the diagram at the bottom of the page, it might be possible to read it then! Editor's Note: Oh, Ruth...then what fun would it be.

Posted by:Ruth Mc |August 28, 2012 at 09:33 AM

Actually, it would. But I'll let you off for that barbed comment seeing as no-one is particularly cheerful when they have a long day at work looming ahead...

Posted by:Ruth Mc |August 29, 2012 at 09:24 AM

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The 'Vulpecula White Dwarf' --A Hot Zone for Habitable Planets?

The 'Vulpecula White Dwarf' --A Hot Zone for Habitable Planets?
The 'Vulpecula White Dwarf' --A Hot Zone for Habitable Planets?The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy  « The Most Massive Black Hole in the Universe --6.6 Billion Solar Masses |Main| Image of the Day: A Spiral Galaxy in Eridanus --'Supernova Mine Field' »

August 01, 2012 The 'Vulpecula White Dwarf' --A Hot Zone for Habitable Planets?

 

       

Looking like an image out of a video game, M 27, or NGC 6853 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years. Its central star, a white dwarf, is larger than any other known white dwarf in the universe. Also known by the absurd name, the Dumbbell, it contains knots marked by a central region of dark and bright cusped knots and their associated dark tails. The knots vary in appearance from symmetric objects with tails to rather irregular tail-less objects. Similarly to the Helix Nebula and the Eskimo Nebula, the heads of the knots have bright cusps which are local.

It could just be that the most productive to look for planets that can support life is around dim, dying stars called white dwarfs. Eric Agol, a University of Washington  professor of astronomy, has suggested that potentially habitable planets orbiting white dwarfs could be much easier to find than other exoplanets located so far.
White dwarfs, though born hot, typically have about 60 percent of the mass of the sun, but by volume they are only about the size of Earth. They eventually become cooler than the sun and emit just a fraction of its energy, so the habitable zones for their planets are significantly closer than Earth is to the sun.

"If a planet is close enough to the star, it could have a stable temperature long enough to have liquid water at the surface –- if it has water at all –- and that's a big factor for habitability," Agol said.

The nearest white dwarf to Earth is Sirius B at a distance of about 8.5 light years (a light year is about 6 trillion miles). It is believed to once have been five times more massive than the sun, but now it has about the same mass as the sun packed into the same volume as Earth.

Agol is proposing a survey of the 20,000 white dwarfs closest to Earth. Using a 1-meter ground telescope, he said, one star could be surveyed in 32 hours of observation. If there is no telltale dimming of light from the star in that time, it means no planet orbiting closely enough to be habitable is passing in front of the star so that it is easily observable from Earth. Ideally, the work could be carried out by a network of telescopes that would make successive observations of a white dwarf as it progresses through the sky.
"This could take a huge amount of time, even with such a network," he said.

The same work could be accomplished by larger specialty telescopes, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that is planned for operations later this decade in Chile, of which the UW is a founding partner. If it turns out that the number of white dwarfs with potential Earthlike planets is very small –- say one in 1,000 –- that telescope still would be able to track them down efficiently.

Finding an Earthlike planet around a white dwarf could provide a meaningful place to look for life, Agol said. But it also would be a potential lifeboat for humanity if Earth, for some reason, becomes uninhabitable.

"Those are the reasons I find this project interesting," he said. "And there's also the question of, 'Just how special is Earth?'"

The Daily Galaxy via astrobio.net and ESO.org

Image Credit: http://www.sc.eso.org/~tszeifer/

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