Exoplanets

Sources

Administrator, NASA. "Young Stars." NASA. NASA, 11 Mar. 2016. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.

Dunbar, Brian. "Kepler Mission Manager Update." NASA. NASA, 15 Apr. 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.

"Posts about direct imaging on Tim Kendall's Extreme Astrophysics." Tim Kendalls Extreme Astrophysics. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.

Strickland, Ashley. "The universe is about to get a little more crowded with planets." CNN. Cable News Network, 21 Feb. 2017. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.

Doppler Spectroscopy

Periodic variation in the star's velocity that tells us that is has unseen companion, possibly a planet.

The velocity change (K) gives the star's orbital speed

Combining K and P gives us the planets mass.

Young Star

Kepler

Statistical mission

Kepler Mission

Discovery of an Exoplanet

First discovery in 1988

-Two Swiss astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b

-a planet found orbiting the binary star

system Gamma Cephei.

It took years to confirm because we had very limited technology.

Kepler Mission

Launched in March 2009

Uses transit method to scan 150,000 stars in the Constellation Cygnus

Debris Disk

What is an Exoplanet?

Kepler has detected over 1500 planets as small as Mercury

A circumsteller disc of dust and debris in orbit around the star. Sometime these discs contain prominent rings

A planet that orbits a star outside the solar system

Exoplanets

Presentation by:

Shelby Genteman, Rachel Himmelberg, Riley Delibero

Transit Method

A method that detects distant planets by measuring the minute dimming of a star as an orbiting planet passes between it and the Earth

First Confirmed Discovery orbiting a pulsar

Examples of Direct Imaging of Exoplanets

First confirmed discovery was in 1992

First successful direct imaging

First successful direct image of an extrasolar planet

-was the companion of the brown dwars 2m1207 by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2004

Confirmed planet orbiting a main sequence

star 51 Pegasus came in 1995