Science

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope data used to discover Multi-Planet System

January 13, 2018 21:36·
Image for representational purpose only

Image for representational purpose only

The Kepler-11 planetary system is one of the multi-planet systems studied by Dr. Weiss and her colleagues. There's no way water would exist on the surface, as portrayed here.

It's called K2-138, where "K2" signifies that it was discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope during its K2 mission - an exoplanet-hunting mission that's been ongoing for the past three years.

Citizen scientists have discovered five tightly packed planets outside our solar system, almost 620 light years from Earth, using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Their orbits around their parent star appear to be concentric circles, unlike the elliptical ones we are familiar with in the solar system. We have planets of all shapes and sizes, and the distances between the orbits around the Sun vary wildly. They are all being classified as super-Earths, weighing in at about two to three times larger than our planet. The planets were also found orbiting in an interesting mathematical configuration called "resonance" in which, each planet takes 50 percent longer to complete its orbit than the planet further in. It shows us yet another way that star systems can be configured. "Orbital commensurabilities among planets are fundamentally fragile, so the present-day configuration of the K2-138 planets clearly points to a rather gentle and laminar formation environment of these distant worlds".

The paper is titled "The K2-138 system: A Near-Resonant Chain of Five Sub-Neptune Planets Discovered by Citizen Scientists". Dr. Weiss is part of the California Kepler Survey team, which used Keck Observatory to gather high-resolution images of 1305 stars hosting 2025 exoplanets originally discovered by Kepler. Typically, computer programs flag the stars with these brightness dips, then astronomers look at each one and decide whether or not they truly could host a planet candidate. A dip in starlight indicates a possible transit, or crossing, of an object such as a planet in front of its star.

Over the three years of the K2 mission, 287,309 stars have been observed, and tens of thousands more roll in every few months. Known as the C12 dataset, this represents a disgusting amount of data for scientists to sift through.

The Exoplanet Explorers citizen scientist project, the brainchild UC Santa Cruz astronomer Ian Crossfield and Caltech staff scientist Jessie Christiansen, began its search for new planets on crowdsourcing research platform Zooniverse.

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According to Nasa, a new batch of 2017 Kepler data was recently uploaded to the Exoplanets Explorers. Users could then sift through actual light curves from the K2 mission and click "yes" or "no", depending on whether they thought the curve looked like a transit.

At least 10 users would have to look at a potential signal, and 90 per cent of these users would have to vote "yes", for researchers to consider the signal for further analysis.

During the Stargazing Live series, results from more than 10,000 viewers were collected by the Exoplanet Explorers.

An global research team led by Université de Montréal astrophysicist Lauren Weiss discovered the pattern, which indicates that most planetary systems might have different formation histories than our own. On the final night of the three-day program, researchers announced the discovery of a four-planet system. "But those can take a while to validate, to make sure that it really is a real planet and not a false alarm". In order to test this, the team's next project will be to look for Jupiter-sized exoplanets in multi-planet systems, and see if theses systems are consistent with the hypothesis.

And that's exactly what they did - detecting a star with four planets orbiting around it. It's now the first multi-planet system discovered entirely through crowdsourcing. Crossfield says as more data becomes available from other observational campaigns, he hopes scientists and citizens can work together to uncover new astrophysical phenomena. We need to find even more planets - and hopefully next time the planets will be a bit more. hospitable.

A study led by astrophysicist Lauren Weiss of the Université de Montréal has found that, in other solar systems with multiple planets, the planets are much more similar in size to one another, and their orbits are more evenly spaced.

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