Extrasolar Planets - Blog Posts
December 17th of 2019 is The Launch Date of The CHEOPS_Mission to measure The Radii of EXOPLANETS Which have already been discovered by now.
This is The Smallest Sized EXOPLANET Discovered by NASA's TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE so far!
NASA's TESS mission finds its smallest planet yet
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.
Two other worlds orbit the same star. While all three planets’ sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present. The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets – that is, planets beyond our solar system – that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.
“The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS,” said Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “For atmospheric studies of small planets, you need short orbits around bright stars, but such planets are difficult to detect. This system has the potential for fascinating future studies.”
A paper on the findings, led by Kostov, was published in the June 27 issue of The Astronomical Journal.
Keep reading
This could be The First Confirmed Astronomical Discovery of an Extrasolar_Moon more than 20_Years after The First Confirmed Astronomical Discovery of an Extrasolar_Planet was made!
Life in The TRAPPIST_1 System
The Potential for Life is higher than ever on The TRAPPIST_1 Exoplanets, a Researcher says. http://wr.al/1AePv
Nearby Exoplanet is 'excellent' target in The Search for Life.
NASA’s TESS Mission to Search for Lots More EXOPLANETS is now about to be Launched someday really soon!
The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS
We’re getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It’s preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We’re expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we’re also predicting we’ll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.
TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star’s brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We’ve found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That’s over 75% of all the exoplanets we’ve found so far!
TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.
What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.
TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).
Kepler’s goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS’s mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they’re made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.
The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!
Watch the Launch + More!
Sunday, April 15 11 a.m. EDT - NASA Social Mission Overview
Join mission experts to learn more about TESS, how it will search for worlds beyond our solar system and what scientists hope to find! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
1 p.m. EDT - Prelaunch News Conference
Get an update on the spacecraft, the rocket and the liftoff operations ahead of the April 16 launch! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
3 p.m. EDT - Science News Conference
Hear from mission scientists and experts about the science behind the TESS mission. Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
4 p.m. EDT - TESS Facebook Live
This live show will dive into the science behind the TESS spacecraft, explain how we search for planets outside our solar system and will allow you to ask your questions to members of the TESS team.
Watch HERE.
Monday, April 16 10 a.m. EDT - NASA EDGE: TESS Facebook Live
This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.
Watch HERE.
1 p.m. EDT - Reddit AMA
Join us live on Reddit for a Science AMA to discuss the hunt for exoplanets and the upcoming launch of TESS!
Join in HERE.
6 p.m. EDT - Launch Coverage!
TESS is slated to launch at 6:32 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Watch HERE.
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Spectroscopic Observations of The Atmospheres and possibly even The Surfaces of Extrasolar Planets and Extrasolar Satellites.
ESA’s next science mission to focus on nature of exoplanets
The nature of planets orbiting stars in other systems will be the focus for ESA’s fourth medium-class science mission, to be launched in mid 2028.
Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote‐sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large‐survey mission, was selected by ESA today as part of its Cosmic Vision plan.
The mission addresses one of the key themes of Cosmic Vision: What are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life?
Thousands of exoplanets have already been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits, but there is no apparent pattern linking these characteristics to the nature of the parent star. In particular, there is a gap in our knowledge of how the planet’s chemistry is linked to the environment where it formed, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet’s evolution.
Ariel will address fundamental questions on what exoplanets are made of and how planetary systems form and evolve by investigating the atmospheres of hundreds of planets orbiting different types of stars, enabling the diversity of properties of both individual planets as well as within populations to be assessed.
Observations of these worlds will give insights into the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation, and their subsequent evolution, in turn contributing to put our own Solar System in context.
“Ariel is a logical next step in exoplanet science, allowing us to progress on key science questions regarding their formation and evolution, while also helping us to understand Earth’s place in the Universe,” says Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science.
“Ariel will allow European scientists to maintain competitiveness in this dynamic field. It will build on the experiences and knowledge gained from previous exoplanet missions.”
The mission will focus on warm and hot planets, ranging from super-Earths to gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars, taking advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres to decipher their bulk composition.
Ariel will measure the chemical fingerprints of the atmospheres as the planet crosses in front of its host star, observing the amount of dimming at a precision level of 10–100 parts per million relative to the star.
As well as detecting signs of well-known ingredients such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, it will also be able to measure more exotic metallic compounds, putting the planet in context of the chemical environment of the host star.
For a select number of planets, Ariel will also perform a deep survey of their cloud systems and study seasonal and daily atmospheric variations.
Ariel’s metre-class telescope will operate at visible and infrared wavelengths. It will be launched on ESA’s new Ariane 6 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou in mid 2028. It will operate from an orbit around the second Lagrange point, L2, 1.5 million kilometres directly ‘behind’ Earth as viewed from the Sun, on an initial four-year mission.
Following its selection by ESA’s Science Programme Committee, the mission will continue into another round of detailed mission study to define the satellite’s design. This would lead to the ‘adoption’ of the mission – presently planned for 2020 – following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build it.
Ariel was chosen from three candidates, competing against the space plasma physics mission Thor (Turbulence Heating ObserveR) and the high-energy astrophysics mission Xipe (X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer).
Solar Orbiter, Euclid and Plato have already been selected as medium-class missions.
Project Blue for Alpha Centauri.
One Search for Planets in The Alpha_Centauri System is: Project Blue. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/project-blue-aims-to-snap-the-first-picture-of-an-exoplanet-in-alpha-centauri/
At Least 94 More Exoplanets were just recently discovered by Astronomers and Astrophysicists using NASA's Kepler Space_Telescope.
Scientists discover almost 100 new exoplanets
“We started out analyzing 275 candidates of which 149 were validated as real exoplanets. In turn 95 of these planets have proved to be new discoveries,” said American PhD student Andrew Mayo at the National Space Institute (DTU Space) at the Technical University of Denmark.
“This research has been underway since the first K2 data release in 2014.”
Mayo is the main author of the work being presented in the Astronomical Journal.
The research has been conducted partly as a senior project during his undergraduate studies at Harvard College. It has also involved a team of international colleagues from institutions such as NASA, Caltech, UC Berkeley, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Tokyo.
Keep reading
ESA’s GAIA Mission might reveal a Treasure Trove of Nee Exoplanetary Discoveries!
The Science of Photosynthetic Lifeforms on Habitable Zone Worlds in other solar_systems.
The Photosynthetic Colors of Alien Lifeforms on Habitable Worlds in other solar_systems.
A Huge_Planet that’s "too big for its Host_Star" has been spotted orbiting a Faint Red_Dwarf Star by some Australian Researchers - with the help of a Backyard Astronomer.
The European Space_Agency’s GAIA_Mission might help Astronomers discover a lot more Extrasolar_Planets.
(via European satellite could discover thousands of planets in Earth's galaxy (arXiv))
Three planets with sizes and temperatures akin to those of the Earth and Venus are circling a dwarf star 40 light-years away. The star in question, named TRAPPIST-1 after the telescope used to observe it, is weaker and cooler than the Sun at the heart of our solar system. "With such short orbital
Here are The Top_Ten Star_Wars Planets!
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqHGZu0DBag)