I Inside The 24/7 Search For Another Habitable Planet Within 100 Ly

[alberto91]

Hi,

Forbes just published an article about the Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2019/11/25/inside-the-247-search-for-another-habitable-planet-within-100-light-years-of-earth/#149fbf103442

I hope you find it interesting!

We welcome any type of observatory to join us.

Cheers!

 

[BvU]

 

[Vanadium 50]

M class stars don't flare? News to me.

 

[davenn]

M class stars don't flare? News to me.

hahaha yup, not a very good article

D

 

[Nik_2213]

A newspaper report that over-simplifies the physics and lacks a one-touch 'global' cookie opt-out ?
Sadly, that's not news...

 

[Vanadium 50]

"We’ve chosen observatories in deserts or high regions or mountains because weather is always the main problem with projects like this "

You know, like Indiana. Elevation 866 feet, rainfall 36 inches.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'd be interested in what people like @Andy Resnick and @russ_watters think abut the idea of discovery by ground-based amateur photometry. Follow-up, sure. But discovery?

PS It takes photometry good to better than a part in a thousand over the course of several hours, with an individual exposure time in the minutes, for a meter-class telescope.

 

[trurle]

I'd be interested in what people like @Andy Resnick and @russ_watters think abut the idea of discovery by ground-based amateur photometry. Follow-up, sure. But discovery?

PS It takes photometry good to better than a part in a thousand over the course of several hours, with an individual exposure time in the minutes, for a meter-class telescope.

From the project webpage
https://exoplanetschannel.wixsite.com/home/project
seems the project is a sort of searching for "low hanging fruits" - trying to detect large, long-period planets around small stars with at least one already discovered transiting hot Jupiter.
For this sort of discovery, coverage of observations would be much more important than sensitivity of observation. After all, candidate planets in habitable zone would have roughly 1 hour eclipse per thousands hours of observation time, although dip depth may be as high as 10000 ppm. It would also likely necessary to record several transits before these will stand out from flare/spots noise of small stars.
The parametric space (star magnitude and transit depth) overlaps more with WASP rather than TrES or KELT - therefore large telescopes are expected to participate.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The Forbes article specifically says that Jupiter-sized objects are bad, and in any event, searching for uninhabitable planets in the habitable zone is kind of strange, no? Especially considering the thread title.

The 16" telescope in the high-mountain desert of northeast Indiana has posted some of their (very nice) data on follow-ups. They have looked at Tres-3 (magnitude 12.4) and HD80606 (magnitude 9) and some others earlier on. They have what looks like 0.1% photometric resolution.

Our friends at Exoplanetschannel are currently looking at Gliese 1214. Magnitude 14.6. That's 7.5x dimmer than Tres-3. That's why I asked our astrophotography experts what they think of it. As someone who hasbn't done photometry in ages, it looks kind of marginal to me - that's why I called out for experts.

A one hour transit requires exposure times of a few minutes to get a good light curve. A 16" scope can probably collect enough photons to do this, but it has to be very efficient, and there's not a large margin of error. It cannot be systematics limited.

 

[Andy Resnick]

I'd be interested in what people like @Andy Resnick and @russ_watters think abut the idea of discovery by ground-based amateur photometry. Follow-up, sure. But discovery?

PS It takes photometry good to better than a part in a thousand over the course of several hours, with an individual exposure time in the minutes, for a meter-class telescope.

Based on their guidelines (1% 'depth', at least 2 data points/minute, etc), I'd be surprised if some random goofing around in their yard (ahem...) could find anything.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Thanks. Unfortunate, but sadly not surprising.