Tuesday, February 7, 2023

3864 - EXOPLANETS - so many discoveries?

 

-  3864  -   EXOPLANETS  -  so many discoveries?   Astronomers have discovered more than 5,200 exoplanets, less than 200 are rocky terrestrial exoplanet.   Exoplanet “Wolf 1069 b”, which orbits a red dwarf star, Wolf 1069, is only 31 light-years from Earth.


            ---------------------  3864  -   EXOPLANETS  -  so many discoveries?

-   Wolf 1069 b is potentially a rocky world, at about 1.26 the mass of Earth and 1.08 the size. Wolf 1069 b also orbits in its star's habitable zone, making it a prime candidate for liquid water to potentially exist on its surface.

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-   It orbits the star within 15.6 days at a distance equivalent to one-15th of the separation between the Earth and the sun.  The planet Mercury, which is the closest planet to our sun, has an orbital period of 88 days. As a result, its surface temperatures reach as high as 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

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-    Unlike Mercury, Wolf 1069 b lies within its star habitable zone despite its much shorter orbital period of 15.6 days. This is because its star is a red dwarf star, meaning it's much smaller than our sun and Wolf 1069 b receives approximately 65% of the solar radiance that Earth receives. This improves its prospects for habitability, with relatively desirable surface temperatures that range between minus 139.27 degrees Fahrenheit and 55.13 F  with an average of minus 40.25 F.

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-    One unique feature of Wolf 1069 b is that it is tidally locked to its parent star, meaning one side is always in daylight and the opposite side is always in darkness. (This attribute is shared by the moon in its orbit around Earth, as well as with most habitable exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars.)

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-    While tidal locking means the planet doesn't have a day/night cycle like Earth, the researchers hope that its dayside could still boast habitable conditions.

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-   The discovery of Wolf 1069 b was made possible with the CARMENES (Calar Alto High-Resolution Search for M Dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and Optical Échelle Spectographs) instrument on the 11.5-foot  telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain.

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-   CARMENES can observe astronomical objects using two separate spectrographs in both the visual and near-infrared channels. The instrument discovered Wolf 1069 b using the exoplanet detection method known as “radial velocity”, which detects small wiggles in a star's location caused by a planet's gravity.

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-    Given its relatively short distance from Earth of 31 light-years, Wolf 1069 b is now the sixth closest Earth-mass habitable zone exoplanet; the others are, in order of increasing distance, “Proxima Centauri b”, “GJ 1061 d”, “Teegarden's Star c”, and “GJ 1002 b and c.”

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-  Wolf 1069 b is not a transiting planet, and for this reason, we won't be able to further characterize its atmosphere using the transmission spectroscopy method as is being currently undergone for transiting planets using JWST.

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-   There are several ways that exoplanet discoveries are made. The most obvious way to find an exoplanet is to see it directly using a telescope. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because distant planets are so faint they are usually lost in the bright glare of their host stars. Nevertheless, this approach has been successful in some cases.

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-    The majority of exoplanets have been found by transit, which involves looking for a slight dimming of the host star as the planet passes in front of it. However, this can only be used if the geometry of the planet's orbit allows us to see the transit from Earth.

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-    As a planet orbits around a star it causes the star to wobble slightly. In principle, using a precision measuring technique called astrometry, this wobble can be observed directly. It was the first exoplanet detection method to be tried, but has only been successful in a handful of cases.

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-    In practice, it's much easier to detect the tiny wobble caused by an orbiting planet by looking at a star’s velocity rather than its position in the sky. This can be done using spectroscopic techniques, and the resulting "radial velocity" method has been very successful at detecting exoplanets.

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-    The final method of discovery is called gravitational microlensing and requires Einstein’s theory of relativity. This shows how light from a distant object is bent as a star passes between it and the observer. The pattern of bending is slightly different if there is a planet orbiting the star.

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-    NASA’s top planet hunter at the moment is TESS, the “Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite”. This detects exoplanets by measuring the slight dimming of their host stars when a planet crosses the telescope’s line of sight to them.

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-    This can be a slow process, because astronomers may need to observe several transits to get a full picture of the planet's orbit and there may be months or years between transits, depending on how rapidly the planet orbits.

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-   In the case of “TIC 172900988 b”, the whole process was quick because it orbits two stars and TESS saw it transit across both of them. It also observed no fewer than three mutual eclipses between the stars themselves. Putting all this information together gave researchers everything they needed to calculate the orbit in detail.

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-    Brown dwarfs are enigmatic objects that are neither stars nor planets. With just 15 to 75 times the mass of Jupiter they’re unable to sustain the fusion reactions that make stars shine, yet they’re found in the depths of space, rather than orbiting around a star like planets do.

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-    Brown dwarfs are sometimes found in pairs, but it's only recently that one was discovered with what appears to have a planet orbiting around it. The brown dwarf in question is “CFHTWIR-Oph 98”, and its planetary companion, possibly as small as 4.1 Jupiter masses.

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-    The sun's nearest cosmic neighbor is the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.25-light-years away. There was a flurry of excitement in 2016 when a planet was found orbiting this star. It was a particularly significant discovery, because the planet  appears to be similar in size to Earth and is located in the star’s habitable zone.

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-   Then in 2020, astronomers announced the likely discovery of a second planet in the same system. However this one, dubbed Proxima Centauri c, is less likely to be habitable, orbiting so far out that it receives very little of the star’s warmth.

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-     TESS in 2020 discovered a family of four planets orbiting a sun-like star “HD 108236”. Described by their discoverers as "a super-Earth and three sub-Neptunes", these cover a range of planetary sizes not found here in the solar system, larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

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-  The innermost of the four planets, the super-Earth “HD 108236 b”. With over three times the mass of our own planet , this orbits 22 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. This gives it an amazingly short year of just 3.8 days, and, of course, makes it too hot to inhabit. NASA estimates its surface temperature at a scorching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

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-    This huge planet,11 times the mass of Jupiter, is one of the few exoplanets to be discovered by direct imaging.   It was originally found in 2013 by the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, but it wasn’t until 2020 that details of its orbit were worked out using data collected by the Hubble telescope.

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-    It turned out to be a truly extraordinary orbit almost 68 billion miles out from its host binary star, which is 730 times further than the distance between Earth and the sun. This huge orbit gives the planet an incredibly long year of the order of 15,000 Earth years.

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-  By 2023, 120 exoplanets have been found by the gravitational microlensing technique. Many of these bear the prefix OGLE, because they were detected by the “Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment”. One of the most recent discoveries, OGLE-2019-BLG-0960 b, is particularly significant because it is the smallest planet yet found by this method.

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-    It is between 1.4 and 3.1 times the mass of the Earth, and to orbit a star smaller than our own at a distance 1.2 to 2.3 times the Earth’s distance from the sun.

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-    “Astrometry” is one of the trickiest methods used to find exoplanets, involving very precise measurements of the position of a star to detect the tiny wobble caused by an orbiting planet. It's normally done using optical telescopes, but in 2020 the first astrometric detection was made via radio astronomy.

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-    This used a continent-wide network of radio telescopes stretching between Hawaii and Puerto Rico to detect a Saturn-sized planet orbiting around an ultra-cool dwarf star. Researchers used the measured wobble to establish that the planet has an orbital period of approximately 221 days.

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-    Most of the exoplanets found  so far are relatively nearby in cosmic terms ,generally within about 3,000 light years. That's still well within our own Milky Way galaxy, but there must be countless exoplanets in other galaxies too. The first of these was discovered in 2020, lurking in the Whirlpool Galaxy Messier 5, an incredible 28 million light years away.  “M51-ULS-1b”, was detected by the conventional transit method but using X-ray observations rather than visible light.

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-    The planet orbits an X-ray binary system consisting of an ordinary sun-like star together with a much more compact object such as a neutron star or black hole. These systems are powerful emitters of X-rays, which is why they can be detected at enormous distances.

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-    Exoplanets “GJ 367 b”, announced in December 2021  is one of the weirdest. Found using TESS, it's a small world, about half the mass of Earth , and it’s so close to its parent star that it completes a whole orbit in just 8 hours.

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-   In other words, the planet’s "year" is just a third of an Earth day! At a distance of 31 light years, GJ 367 b is close enough that astronomers can study its properties in detail. 

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-   It probably has a similar composition to Mercury, and an even higher surface temperature up to 2,700 °F  on the planet's dayside.  That's far too hot for life to exist there, although it's possible there are other more habitable planets orbiting further out from the same star.

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            February 6, 2023       EXOPLANETS  -  so many discoveries?             3864                                                                                                                            

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--------------------- ---  Tuesday, February 7, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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