Participate in the Search for Exoplanets

PlanetHunters.org

Search for Extrasolar Planets

Want to take part in the search for Exoplanets around our neighboring star systems? Even if you don't understand any of the math or physics behind searching for extrasolar planets, you can learn what you need to do and how to do so (and be part of a growing Astronomy Community online) over at the tutorial on
Planet Hunters.

There's a comprehensive tutorial, knowledgebase and some really stellar web technologies at work on this site. You can participate in many ways. Mine own has been to help measure (or to go through the data) magnitude changes in light from nearby stars, hoping to find changes that are indicative of a planet or other planetary body passing between the star and our observation point here on Earth.

From planethunters.org:   

"The Kepler spacecraft stares at a field of stars in the Cygnus constellation and records the brightness of those stars every thirty minutes to search for transiting planets."

Exoplanet Search 

To Join up with Planethunters.org (as well as several other really cool Astronomy and NASA-related websites, you first need a free Zooniverse Profile:  https://www.zooniverse.org/signup

Learn more about how to participate in some of the bleeding edge of Science at:
https://www.zooniverse.org/project/planethunters

Here are the collection of Projects you can participate with:

Live Projects

100 Billion Planets in Milky Way Galaxy

Billions and Billions of Planets

Release 1/3/13

Exoplanets

Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But the sky is also filled with planets -- billions and billions of them at least.

That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32 -- planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority of planets in our galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most of these worlds form.

"There are at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy, just our galaxy," says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. "That's mind-boggling."

Image credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

"It's a staggering number, if you think about it," adds Jonathan Swift, a postdoctoral student at Caltech and lead author of the paper. "Basically, there's one of these planets per star."

One of the fundamental questions regarding the origin of planets is how many of them there are. Like the Caltech group, other teams of astronomers have estimated that there is roughly one planet per star, but this is the first time researchers have made such an estimate by studying M-dwarf systems, the most numerous population of exoplanets known.

Kepler Space Telescope

The planetary system in question, which was detected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, contains five planets. 

• Two of the planets orbiting Kepler-32 had previously been discovered by other astronomers. 

• The Caltech team confirmed the remaining three, then analyzed the five-planet system and compared it to other systems found by Kepler.  

• M-dwarf systems like Kepler-32's are quite different from our own solar system. For one, M dwarfs are cooler and much smaller than the sun. Kepler-32, for example, has half the mass of the sun and half its radius.

 The radii of its five planets range from 0.8 to 2.7 times that of Earth, and those planets orbit extremely close to their star. The whole Kepler-32 system fits within just over a tenth of an astronomical unit (the average distance between Earth and the sun) -- a distance that is about a third of the radius of Mercury's orbit around the sun.

The fact that M-dwarf systems vastly outnumber other kinds of systems carries a profound implication, according to Johnson, which is that our solar system is extremely rare. "It's just a weirdo," he says. 

Read the full Caltech story at http://www.caltech.edu/content/planets-abound .

Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

For more information about NASA's Kepler mission, visit: Kepler Space Telescope .

Full Article Credit:

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Related articles

• 100 Billion Alien Planets Fill Our Milky Way Galaxy: Study (space.com)
• Planets Abound (spacefellowship.com)

Extrasolar Planets (Video)

From Science 360: an excellent video to learn the Science behind the News: Extrasolar Planets (Exoplanets)

Solar System Simulation

Extrasolar planets are called exoplanets. The heavenly bodies are planets that orbit stars other than our sun. Astronomers primarily use two methods to detect these distant planets: Doppler Method and the Transit method. "Science Behind the News" is produced in partnership with NBC Learn. This video features Dr. William Welsh, an exceptional Astronomer and Scientist at San Diego State University.

Provided by the National Science Foundation & NBC Learn

Runtime: 4:35

 

More Science Behind The News videos

Related articles

• Seven planets in galaxy could be habitable, scientists say (telegraph.co.uk)
• The First Exoplanet Discovery Claim (scilogs.com)