Exoplanets Definition and 51 Threads

I love weather and atmospheric physics! So when I recently read Dune, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “Coriolis Storm”, wondering if such a crazy storm could really exist, ripping around an Earth-like planet at 700 km/h. For me, this became a worldbuilding exercise: What makes the windiest...

Each new report of a confirmed exoplanet adds to the database of knowledge. For obvious reasons, our confirmations seem to stack up in the areas we are currently best able to detect. eg.: Large bodies: Jupiter-sized down to Sub-Neptune-sized, with a smattering of super-Earths. Nape-of-star...

Stumbled over this one. Thought it might be pertinent. Science Fiction Media Representations of Exoplanets: Portrayals of Changing Astronomical Discoveries. "Interest in science fiction's (SF's) potential science communication use is hindered by concerns about SF misrepresenting science. This...

Hi. I am working on a research paper for my high school and I am trying to calculate the mass of KELT-8b using the radial velocity values of its star. However, I am confused as to the binary mass function and what units you would use. I was under the impression you would use solar masses however...

Interesting paper of triple and higher order star systems with planets. An Early Catalog of Planet Hosting Multiple Star Systems of Order Three and Higher https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11346 https://phys.org/news/2023-05-astrophysicists-planet-hosting-three-star.html Interesting comment: "

As the stars in the milky way are only ever going to be seen as pinpricks even with the most powerful telescopes, how do astronomers find exoplanets, and further how can they tell their size and atmosphere etc?

Is there any good simulation to test out radial velocity and/or maybe mess around with exoplanets? If there is please let me know! I want to try out this simulation where I change the luminosity of a star and see how the accuracy of the radial velocity changes, but a basic simulation would...

In October 2012, astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B. However, three years later, they concluded that it probably doesn’t exist. In 2013, astronomers also detected another possible exoplanet, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet. As of today, no...

Hi! If you are interested in exoplanets, you might want to know these little known facts about exoplanets. Source: In our stellar neighborhood there might be around 130 potentially (p.) habitable exoplanets, 10 of them being Earth-like. The closest p. Earth-like planet is called Tau Ceti e...

As of September 2019, these are the 5 potentially habitable exoplanets closer to Earth: Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK6owRTFz0Q1.GLIESE 273 b Gliese 283 b orbits the red dwarf star Luyten, located 12 light years away. - The exoplanet is 84% similar to Earth. - It has an orbital period of...

Hi, I thought I would come and ask here as something has been bugging me for quite a while. Exoplanets. I'm not being bugged by the fact we are looking for them or that they exist. I am a bit suspicious of some of the evidence and how it's interpreted. While the adage is "Extraordinary...

Hello. In this issue of the American Scientist magazine, https://www.americanscientist.org/magazine/issues/2018/september-october, there's an article by Dominik Kraus of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf Institute of Radiation Physics about the internal composition of the planets Uranus...

Hi guys, I detected my first exoplanet (hd 189733 b) and made a video about it showing step by step how I did it. I thought it could be useful for the people interested in the topic or already starting with transit photometry. The star has an apparent magnitude of 7.7 and the exoplanet...

The time required for the observation of three successive transits of an exoplanet in front of its primary star is the minimum time necessary for the confirmation of the exoplanet. Three transits, not two, are needed to establish the periodicity of the transits. Given only two dips in...

Kepler space mission has discovered thousands of exo-planet candidates. Why are they just candidates ? Why followup ground based study is required ? Why is Kepler unable to confirm them ? Second thing, how are scientists going to differentiate between eclipsing binaries mimicking to be exoplanets.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb/meta (abstract). Using microlensing the authors observed (my bolding): Does someone know the reason why unbound planets are the only reasonable way to explain their data? This is not my field, but looks like a big stretch to me, a...

For years I have read and heard that the Solar System is there because of angular momentum issues. That is to say, the Sun itself can only rotate at some maximum rate in order to stay intact and the planets are there to equalise the angular momentum of the original nebula and produce a stable...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171130180031.htm However, the question of habitability is highly complex. Researchers led by space physicist Chuanfei Dong of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have recently...

How much more refined are the various variables of the Drake Equation in view of the recent findings by the Kepler Telescope? I imagine fp and ne would surely be better estimates. Is there a study on this anywhere?

I am very interested in Astrobiology and just came across this 7-year old abstract by Seth Shostak (of SETI): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576510002195 There is a lot of emphasis on searching for biological life outside of our solar system, especially with the...

does anyone have any information on why the vast majority of exoplanets are located in one spot? any papers on the topic? the following link does not graph RA vs DEC but instead does something about planet size, if you wish to use it please select RA for the x-axis and DEC for the y-axis, both...

The interview: John Batchelor Show The scientific paper: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7650/full/nature22055.html[/PLAIN] ]Nature and ArXiv The basic facts: Star Name: LHS 1140 Constellation: Cetus the Whale Distance from Sun: 41 light-years Star type: Red dwarf (much...

In this alternate universe, Earth is the same as back home--8,000 miles wide, 25,000 around, six sextillion tons, orbiting a G-type main-sequence star from a distance of 93 million miles. But here, the similarities end. MOON DIAMETER--3,273 miles MASS--0.025x that of Earth DISTANCE FROM...

NASA announcement Wednesday, 1 pm EST. You can use the forum for time zone conversion: This post was posted 3:55 pm EST. While the announcement doesn't have any details, digging a bit deeper: The livestream website calls the event "Spitzer Exoplanet Science Briefing", and of course we can see...

It has always been my impression than spectral type M stars were notorious for being flare stars. As a result of their small radius and relatively low effective surface temperature, the Habitable Zone has to be relatively close to the surface of the star and small in size. As a result, it...

All light sources fluctuate and I've wondered if auto correlation of the natural fluctuation of a star's output might be used to range it's planets? The concept is to stare at a star (like Kepler does) and record high frequency intensity fluctuations say at a sample rate of 10 times per second...

The Hubble telescope lead to the first spectroscopy of the atmospheres of two Earth-sized exoplanets, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c. A large hydrogen/helium atmosphere could be ruled out - not that surprising, but still nice to have this confirmed. The main star, TRAPPIST-1, is just 40 light...

Source: NASA to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries During Media Teleconference Livestream Time conversion reference: this post was posted at 7:45 pm EDT. My guess: various roughly Earth-sized exoplanets around dwarf stars, probably at least one in the habitable zone. Edit: More than 1000...

Say hello to HD 219134b - a rocky exoplanet recently discovered using HARPS-North instrument on the Italian 3.6-meter Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands, who's existence has been confirmed by NASA's Sptizer Space Telescope. At a distance of 21 light years, it is the closest...

Hi, everybody. Mi name is Fabio Onier Osorio Pelaez and I'm from Colombia. I hope to be finishing my Bachelor´s degree in Physics at University of Antioquia by next August. I'm doing my final project on the detection of planets by the Radial Velocity technique and I have a question about an...

According to Wikipedia, there could be as many as 11 billion planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, with the closest potentially 12 light years away. That number goes up to 40 billion if you include red dwarfs. How would we even go about getting to the nearest Exoearth?

http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/media/pte has an interesting classification, though it's a general grid rather than a wrap-around table. Here are the planet sizes: Mercurian / Miniterran ... 10^(-5) - 0.1 Me ... 0.03 - 0.4 Re Subterran ... 0.1 - 0.5 Me ... 0.4 - 0.8 Re...

When I watched the story about the difficulties to find an object around other stars I started to think in alterinatives that could exist to make the object larger. The presented alternatives will reduce the amount of objects that can be found but can help to find more easy some planets...

I am looking for a good book on Exoplanets and habbitable zones. So that I would be familiar with a large range of exoplanets and the criteria of exoplanets and so on... Please don't hold back on the mathematics (if there is any) or on any scoentific issue, as I am asking for a good scientific...

I have a love and passion for astrophysics, most specifically exoplanets. I do wish to be in the profession. I am 2.5 years away from college, so I have ample time to think about my future. From what I gather from some sources is that the best progression to become one is : BS Physics, MS...

What is the reason for searching for exoplanets? i can think of many reasons why not, including we will never build a spacecraft to visit them, when we get there conditions for human life may not be suitable for human life, this would mean building a spacecraft that could return to earth, which...

There's been a recent upsurge of interest in evidence for rocky planets orbiting red dwarf stars. Red dwarfs are very common in the the Milky Way and can live much longer than larger stars such as our Sun. The possible existence of several rocky planets in the habitable zone of Gliese 581 has...

I keep seeing reports about how all the planets similar to Earth in other nearby planetary systems are now being discovered. Since we won't have the technology to send probes or go there ourselves for some time, all we can do is look at them. My question is: Could we ever get better resolution...

When a stars radial velocity is measured in search for a planet, the planet imparts a radial velocity shift proportional to m\sin i\text{ where }i is the orbital inclination of the planet with respect to our line of sight and m is the planet mass. I've heard that even though the inclinations are...

A while back a new arxiv paper was published. "Transit surveys for Earths in the habitable zones of white dwarfs" http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1103/1103.2791v2.pdf I finally got around to fully reading it, but I'll probably have to reread it to make it stick in my memory. What would...

Would a Physics/Astronomy degree be ideal, or would it be more appropriate to study Earth Sciences like Geology, etc.?

“There are several ways in which a planet can disturb the internal motions of matter in its host star, thereby rearrange the distribution of the various chemical elements and possibly cause the destruction of lithium. It is now up to the theoreticians to figure out which one is the most likely...

exoplanets seem all to have elliptical orbits, and when you look at our solar system the orbits are all nice and defined, how come. And the gaz giants all seem to be star huggers where as in out solar system they are not, any explanations on this difference?

how far are we from detecting a moon around an Earth sized planet in another star system? i read an article recently (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126932.100-why-are-the-sun-and-moon-the-same-size-in-the-sky.html") about how the moon being so close to Earth wasn't, or doesn't...

Hi, I have posted here a few times but lately I think I have been refining my interests somewhat so I want to compare my goals up against the reality. I think I would like to work in a field of study exasolar planets in particular terrestrial ones that may harbor Earth like life. Now some...

Steinn Sigurdsson reports on sensitivity of new planet-search instruments, how slow a wobble can they pick up? If they can see the central body wobble at a speed of only 1 meter/second then they can pick up lower-mass planets, more earthlike planets going in more earthlike orbits, than if they...

Why most extrasolar planet names start with the letters HD

Was wondering if anyone has any good references on exo planets, how their data is listed, a compilation of any relevant information. Much appreciated. :bugeye:

Currently 241 exoplanets. [URL="[PLAIN]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_c"][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_c/URL][/PLAIN] A few are terrestrial such as Gliese c, d at 5x and 8x Earth mass; sufficient mass to be geologically active, and hence a magnetosphere, diverting a stellar...

These are pretty weird. I doubt that a sci-fi author could have come up with them: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/extrasolar_planets.html