An Exoplanet Transit Observing Method Using LCO Telescopes, Exorequest and Astrosource
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Prehistory of Transit Searches Danielle BRIOT1 & Jean
Prehistory of Transit Searches Danielle BRIOT1 & Jean SCHNEIDER2 1) GEPI, UMR 8111, Observatoire de Paris, 61 avenue de l’Observatoire, F- 75014, Paris, France [email protected] 2) LUTh, UMR 8102, Observatoire de Paris, 5 place Jules Janssen, F-92195 Meudon Cedex, France [email protected] Abstract Nowadays the more powerful method to detect extrasolar planets is the transit method, that is to say observations of the stellar luminosity regularly decreasing when the planet is transiting the star. We review the planet transits which were anticipated, searched, and the first ones which were observed all through history. Indeed transits of planets in front of their star were first investigated and studied in the solar system, concerning the star Sun. The first observations of sunspots were sometimes mistaken for transits of unknown planets. The first scientific observation and study of a transit in the solar system was the observation of Mercury transit by Pierre Gassendi in 1631. Because observations of Venus transits could give a way to determine the distance Sun-Earth, transits of Venus were overwhelmingly observed. Some objects which actually do not exist were searched by their hypothetical transits on the Sun, as some examples a Venus satellite and an infra-mercurial planet. We evoke the possibly first use of the hypothesis of an exoplanet transit to explain some periodic variations of the luminosity of a star, namely the star Algol, during the eighteen century. Then we review the predictions of detection of exoplanets by their transits, those predictions being sometimes ancient, and made by astronomers as well as popular science writers. -
2-6-NASA Exoplanet Archive
The NASA Exoplanet Archive Rachel Akeson NASA Exoplanet Science Ins5tute (NExScI) September 29, 2016 NASA Big Data Task Force Overview: Dat a NASA Exoplanet Archive supports both the exoplanet science community and NASA exoplanet missions (Kepler, K2, TESS, WFIRST) • Data • Confirmed exoplanets from the literature • Over 80,000 planetary and stellar parameter values for 3388 exoplanets • Updated weekly • Kepler stellar proper5es, planet candidate, data valida5on and occurrence rate products • MAST is archive for pixel and light curve data • Addi5onal space (CoRoT) and ground-based transit surveys (~20 million light curves) • Transit spectroscopy data • Auto-updated exoplanet plots and movies Big Data Task Force: Exoplanet Archive Overview: Tool s Example: Kepler 14 Time Series Viewer • Interac5ve tables and ploZng for data • Includes light curve normaliza5on • Periodogram calcula5ons • Searches for periodic signals in archive or user-supplied light curves • Transit predic5ons • Uses value from archive to predict future planet transits for observa5on and mission planning • URL-based queries Aliases • Calcula5on of observable proper5es Planet orbital period • Web-based service to collect follow-up observa5ons of planet candidates for Kepler, K2 and TESS (ExoFOP) Stellar ac5vity • Includes user-supplied data, file and notes Big Data Task Force: Exoplanet Archive Data Challenges and Technical Approach (1) • Challenges with Exoplanet Archive are not currently about data volume but about providing CPU resources and data complexity • CPU challenge -
Exep Science Plan Appendix (SPA) (This Document)
ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 1 of 61 Created By: David A. Breda Date Program TDEM System Engineer Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Dr. Nick Siegler Date Program Chief Technologist Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Concurred By: Dr. Gary Blackwood Date Program Manager Exoplanet Exploration Program NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology EXOPDr.LANET Douglas Hudgins E XPLORATION PROGRAMDate Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program ScienceScience Plan Mission DirectorateAppendix NASA Headquarters Karl Stapelfeldt, Program Chief Scientist Eric Mamajek, Deputy Program Chief Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program JPL CL#19-0790 JPL Document No: 1735632 ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 2 of 61 Approved by: Dr. Gary Blackwood Date Program Manager, Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Dr. Douglas Hudgins Date Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Science Mission Directorate NASA Headquarters Created by: Dr. Karl Stapelfeldt Chief Program Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Dr. Eric Mamajek Deputy Program Chief Scientist Exoplanet Exploration Program Office NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © 2018 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. Exoplanet Exploration Program JPL CL#19-0790 ExEP Science Plan, Rev A JPL D: 1735632 Release Date: February 15, 2019 Page 3 of 61 Table of Contents 1. -
The Struve Family in Europe and Texas
THE STRUVE FAMILY IN EUROPE AND TEXAS An 1843 publication by Amand von Struve (1798-1867), a brother of Heinrich Struve (1812- 1898) was the source of information for a re-publication in 1881 by Heinrich von Struve (1840-??), a professor in Warsaw, Poland and a nephew of Heinrich Struve (1812-1898), the man who came to Texas. It is now offered [in an abridged form] by Arno Struve of Abernathy, Texas, great-grandson of Heinrich Struve (1812-1898). The reader is referred to a further explanation of this book at the conclusion of Lebensbild/Memories of My Life. (Title page lettered by D. Z. Ward and manuscript typed by Sandy Struve.) Sandy is a daughter-in-law of Arno Struve. You have in hand the story of a family named Struve. Once it was von Struve. Some individuals still retain the von. The earlier use of the “von” in our name is evidence that someone back there somewhere was honored for service rendered his king. The von is roughly equivalent to knighthood in the English world in which the title “Sir” was conferred by the king. In the English world, however, the title is not inherited whereas in the German practice it is. The importance of the title “von” is difficult for Americans to grasp but Germans fully understand its weight. One of my cousins insisted that I should use the von at least while traveling in Europe, but my egalitarian upbringing would not allow me to feel comfortable doing it. The “von” was dropped from the name when certain family members who were promoting democracy in Germany felt it unbecoming to use an unearned title. -
Exoplanet Exploration Collaboration Initiative TP Exoplanets Final Report
EXO Exoplanet Exploration Collaboration Initiative TP Exoplanets Final Report Ca Ca Ca H Ca Fe Fe Fe H Fe Mg Fe Na O2 H O2 The cover shows the transit of an Earth like planet passing in front of a Sun like star. When a planet transits its star in this way, it is possible to see through its thin layer of atmosphere and measure its spectrum. The lines at the bottom of the page show the absorption spectrum of the Earth in front of the Sun, the signature of life as we know it. Seeing our Earth as just one possibly habitable planet among many billions fundamentally changes the perception of our place among the stars. "The 2014 Space Studies Program of the International Space University was hosted by the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) and the École des Hautes études commerciales (HEC), Montréal, Québec, Canada." While all care has been taken in the preparation of this report, ISU does not take any responsibility for the accuracy of its content. Electronic copies of the Final Report and the Executive Summary can be downloaded from the ISU Library website at http://isulibrary.isunet.edu/ International Space University Strasbourg Central Campus Parc d’Innovation 1 rue Jean-Dominique Cassini 67400 Illkirch-Graffenstaden Tel +33 (0)3 88 65 54 30 Fax +33 (0)3 88 65 54 47 e-mail: [email protected] website: www.isunet.edu France Unless otherwise credited, figures and images were created by TP Exoplanets. Exoplanets Final Report Page i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The International Space University Summer Session Program 2014 and the work on the -
Astronomy Beat
ASTRONOMY BEAT ASTRONOMY BEAT /VNCFSt"QSJM XXXBTUSPTPDJFUZPSH 1VCMJTIFS"TUSPOPNJDBM4PDJFUZPGUIF1BDJöD &EJUPS"OESFX'SBLOPJ ª "TUSPOPNJDBM 4PDJFUZ PG UIF 1BDJöD %FTJHOFS-FTMJF1SPVEöU "TIUPO"WFOVF 4BO'SBODJTDP $" The Origin of the Drake Equation Frank Drake Dava Sobel Editor’s Introduction Most beginning classes in astronomy introduce their students to the Drake Equation, a way of summarizing our knowledge about the chances that there is intelli- ASTRONOMYgent life among the stars with which we humans might BEAT communicate. But how and why did this summary for- mula get put together? In this adaptation from a book he wrote some years ago with acclaimed science writer Dava Sobel, astronomer and former ASP President Frank Drake tells us the story behind one of the most famous teaching aids in astronomy. ore than a year a!er I was done with Proj- 'SBOL%SBLFXJUIUIF%SBLF&RVBUJPO 4FUI4IPTUBL 4&5**OTUJUVUF ect Ozma, the "rst experiment to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civiliza- Mtions, I got a call one summer day in 1961 from a man to be invited. I had never met. His name was J. Peter Pearman, and Right then, having only just met over the telephone, we he was a sta# o$cer on the Space Science Board of the immediately began planning the date and other details. National Academy of Science… He’d followed Project We put our heads together to name every scientist we Ozma throughout, and had since been trying to build knew who was even thinking about searching for ex- support in the government for the possibility of dis- traterrestrial life in 1961. -
GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution
GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy Special Publications No. 1 George Herbig in 1960 —————————————————————– GEORGE HERBIG and Early Stellar Evolution —————————————————————– Bo Reipurth Institute for Astronomy University of Hawaii at Manoa 640 North Aohoku Place Hilo, HI 96720 USA . Dedicated to Hannelore Herbig c 2016 by Bo Reipurth Version 1.0 – April 19, 2016 Cover Image: The HH 24 complex in the Lynds 1630 cloud in Orion was discov- ered by Herbig and Kuhi in 1963. This near-infrared HST image shows several collimated Herbig-Haro jets emanating from an embedded multiple system of T Tauri stars. Courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute. This book can be referenced as follows: Reipurth, B. 2016, http://ifa.hawaii.edu/SP1 i FOREWORD I first learned about George Herbig’s work when I was a teenager. I grew up in Denmark in the 1950s, a time when Europe was healing the wounds after the ravages of the Second World War. Already at the age of 7 I had fallen in love with astronomy, but information was very hard to come by in those days, so I scraped together what I could, mainly relying on the local library. At some point I was introduced to the magazine Sky and Telescope, and soon invested my pocket money in a subscription. Every month I would sit at our dining room table with a dictionary and work my way through the latest issue. In one issue I read about Herbig-Haro objects, and I was completely mesmerized that these objects could be signposts of the formation of stars, and I dreamt about some day being able to contribute to this field of study. -
Planet Hunters TESS I: TOI 813, a Subgiant Hosting a Transiting Saturn-Sized Planet on an 84-Day Orbit
MNRAS 000,1{16 (2019) Preprint 15 January 2020 Compiled using MNRAS LATEX style file v3.0 Planet Hunters TESS I: TOI 813, a subgiant hosting a transiting Saturn-sized planet on an 84-day orbit N. L. Eisner ,1? O. Barrag´an,1 S. Aigrain,1 C. Lintott,1 G. Miller,1 N. Zicher,1 T. S. Boyajian,2 C. Brice~no,3 E. M. Bryant,4;5 J. L. Christiansen,6 A. D. Feinstein,7 L. M. Flor-Torres,8 M. Fridlund,9;10 D. Gandolfi,11 J. Gilbert,12 N. Guerrero,13 J. M. Jenkins,6 K. Jones, 1 M. H. Kristiansen,14 A. Vanderburg,15 N. Law,16 A. R. L´opez-S´anchez,17;18 A. W. Mann,16 E. J. Safron,2 M. E. Schwamb,19;20 K. G. Stassun,21;22 H. P. Osborn,23 J. Wang,24 A. Zic,25;26 C. Ziegler,27 F. Barnet,28 S. J. Bean,28 D. M. Bundy,28 Z. Chetnik,28 J. L. Dawson,28 J. Garstone,28 A. G. Stenner,28 M. Huten,28 S. Larish,28 L. D. Melanson28 T. Mitchell,28 C. Moore,28 K. Peltsch,28 D. J. Rogers,28 C. Schuster,28 D. S. Smith,28 D. J. Simister,28 C. Tanner,28 I. Terentev 28 and A. Tsymbal28 Affiliations are listed at the end of the paper. Submitted on 12 September 2019; revised on 19 December 2019; accepted for publication by MNRAS on 8 January 2020. ABSTRACT We report on the discovery and validation of TOI 813 b (TIC 55525572 b), a tran- siting exoplanet identified by citizen scientists in data from NASA's Transiting Exo- planet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the first planet discovered by the Planet Hunters TESS project. -
Who Really Discovered the First Exoplanet?
Who Really Discovered the First Exoplanet? Two Swiss astronomers got a well-deserved Nobel for finding an exoplanet, but there’s an intriguing backstory By Josh Winn The year 1995, like 1492, was the dawn of an age of discovery. The new explorers, instead of using seagoing vessels to discover continents, use telescopes to discover planets revolving around distant stars. Thousands of these extrasolar planets, a term usually shortened to “exoplanets,” have been found, including a few potentially Earth- like worlds, along with bizarre objects that bear no resemblance to any of the planets in our solar system. Two of these exoplanet explorers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, were recently awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery they made in 1995. My colleagues and I are united in our admiration for their pioneering work, and in our pride to be continuing what they began. But there is something peculiar about the Nobel Prize citation. It says: “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.” Shouldn’t it say the first exoplanet? After all, hundreds of astronomers have discovered an exoplanet. I’ve helped find a few. Even high school students and amateur astronomers have discovered them. Did the Nobel Committee make a typographical error? No, they did not, and thereby hangs a tale. Just as it is problematic to decide who discovered America (Christopher Columbus? John Cabot? Leif Erikson? Amerigo Vespucci, whose name is the one that stuck? Those who came on foot from Siberia tens of thousands of years ago?) it is difficult to say who discovered the first exoplanet. -
Examining Habitability of Kepler Exoplanets Maria Kalambokidis¹
Examining Habitability of Kepler Exoplanets Maria Kalambokidis¹ Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison Abstract Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has confrmed the existence of 3,387 exoplanets with the goal of fnding habitable environments beyond our own. The mechanism capable of stabilizing a planet’s climate is the long-term carbon cycle driven by plate tectonics. We determined the likelihood of plate tectonics for Kepler exoplanets by comparing their interior structures to planets within our solar system. We used the mineral physics toolkit BurnMan to create three models with the same composition as Earth, Mars, and Mercury. We ran 19 exoplanets through the models and calculated their Mantle Radius Fraction (MRF). We found that four exoplanets may be Chthonian, four have Mercury-like MRF values, and two are Earth- like in their MRF values but did not lie within their habitable zone. In the future, as more exoplanet masses are obtained, it is likely that a greater number will appear dynamically similar to the Earth. Introduction Kepler Exoplanets. In the 21st century, the feld of astrobiology has grown tremendously, harnessing the technological and scientifc advancements capable of addressing some of our most fundamental inquiries about life in the universe. Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has utilized transit photometry to explore the diversity of planetary systems beyond our own, confrming the existence of 3,387 exoplanets to date. Many studies have analyzed Kepler’s confrmed exoplanets in an attempt to describe their “Earth-like” properties. Comparisons with the Earth are made considering size (radius) and orbital environment, which is described using the period, semi-major axis, and insolation fux (Batalha 2014). -
A Quantitative Comparison of Exoplanet Catalogs
geosciences Article A Quantitative Comparison of Exoplanet Catalogs Dolev Bashi 1,*, Ravit Helled 2 ID and Shay Zucker 1 1 School of Geosciences, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 6997801 Tel Aviv, Israel; [email protected] 2 Institute for Computational Science, Center for Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +972-54-7365-965 Received: 30 July 2018; Accepted: 25 August 2018; Published: 29 August 2018 Abstract: In this study, we investigated the differences between four commonly-used exoplanet catalogs (exoplanet.eu; exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu; openexoplanetcatalogue.com; exoplanets.org) using a Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test. We found a relatively good agreement in terms of the planetary parameters (mass, radius, period) and stellar properties (mass, temperature, metallicity), although a more careful analysis of the overlap and unique parts of each catalog revealed some differences. We quantified the statistical impact of these differences and their potential cause. We concluded that although statistical studies are unlikely to be significantly affected by the choice of catalog, it would be desirable to have one consistent catalog accepted by the general exoplanet community as a base for exoplanet statistics and comparison with theoretical predictions. Keywords: methods: statistical; astronomical data bases: miscellaneous; catalogs; planetary systems; stars: statistics 1. Introduction Since the detection of ‘51 Peg b’, the first exoplanet around a main sequence star [1], many more planets around other stars have been discovered. Currently, more than 3500 exoplanets have been detected in our galaxy. -
Radial Velocity Transit Animation by European Southern Observatory Animation by NASA Goddard Media Studios
Courtney Dressing Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley The Space Astrophysics Landscape for the 2020s and Beyond April 1, 2019 Credit: NASA David Charbonneau (Co-Chair), Scott Gaudi (Co-Chair), Fabienne Bastien, Jacob Bean, Justin Crepp, Eliza Kempton, Chryssa Kouveliotou, Bruce Macintosh, Dimitri Mawet, Victoria Meadows, Ruth Murray-Clay, Evgenya Shkolnik, Ignas Snellen, Alycia Weinberger Exoplanet Discoveries Have Increased Dramatically Figure Credit: A. Weinberger (ESS Report) What Do We Know Today? (Statements from the ESS Report) • “Planetary systems are ubiquitous and surprisingly diverse, and many bear no resemblance to the Solar System.” • “A significant fraction of planets appear to have undergone large-scale migration from their birthsites.” • “Most stars have planets, and small planets are abundant.” • “Large numbers of rocky planets [have] been identified and a few habitable zone examples orbiting nearby small stars have been found.” • “Massive young Jovians at large separations have been imaged.” • “Molecules and clouds in the atmospheres of large exoplanets have been detected.” • ”The identification of potential false positives and negatives for atmospheric biosignatures has improved the biosignature observing strategy and interpretation framework.” Radial Velocity Transit Animation by European Southern Observatory Animation by NASA Goddard Media Studios How Did We Learn Those Lessons? Astrometry Direct Imaging Microlensing Animation by Exoplanet Exploration Office at NASA JPL Animation by Jason Wang Animation by Exoplanet Exploration Office at NASA JPL Exoplanet Science in the 2020s & Beyond The ESS Report Identified Two Goals 1. “Understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems as products of the process of star formation, and characterize and explain the diversity of planetary system architectures, planetary compositions, and planetary environments produced by these processes.” 2.