TrES-2 passes in front of its host star near the 'edge' of the star's disc, making it an ideal candidate for study (Image: Jeffrey Hall/Lowell Observatory)
Posted on 09/09/2006 9:01:24 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
With this method, astronomers watch for small dips in a star's brightness produced when a planet passes in front of it and blocks some of its light. Because astronomers can track the planet's progress and measure how much light it blocks, they can determine its mass, size and orbit precisely. But this relies on the planet passing in front of its host star, as seen from Earth – an alignment that is surprisingly rare... [R]esearchers led by Francis O'Donovan at Caltech, US... discovered it using a network of amateur-sized telescopes called the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES)... The planet orbits a Sun-like star just 750 light years from Earth, in the constellation Draco... [I]t is slightly larger than Jupiter, with about 1.3 times the giant planet's mass and 1.2 times its radius... just 2.5 days in an orbit just one-tenth that of Mercury's around the Sun. The researchers also hope to learn about its chemical composition and temperature using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which can detect the planet's own infrared glow by studying slight changes in the brightness of the system as the planet passes behind its star... TrES-2 is also in the field of view of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which is set to be launched in June 2008. Kepler should be able to detect slight variations in the timing of the planet's transits, which could reveal the presence of additional planets in the system, or perhaps even an Earth-sized moon around TrES-2, O'Donovan says. Kepler might also be able to detect starlight reflected from the planet itself.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientistspace.com ...
TrES-2 passes in front of its host star near the 'edge' of the star's disc, making it an ideal candidate for study (Image: Jeffrey Hall/Lowell Observatory)
Alien planet poised to reveal all its secretsLuhman argues that any future definition of the term that includes extrasolar planets should stipulate that the objects form from a disc of gas and dust around their host star – and not from a collapsing gas cloud.
by David Shiga
8 September 2006
This find would be excluded from planetary status if such a definition were adopted, a situation that Luhman says is interesting in itself. "It's a neat idea that you have a planetary-mass companion that may not really be a planet," he says.
This is an impressive feat!
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~ftod/tres/tres.html
TrES, the Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey, is a network of three small-aperture telescopes (pictured above) searching the sky for transiting planets. The network consists of Sleuth (Palomar Observatory, Southern California),
the PSST (Lowell Observatory, Northern Arizona) and
STARE (Observatorio del Teide, Canary Islands, Spain).
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the TrES telescopes takes timed exposures of the same field-of-view all night for as many nights as the field is favorably positioned (usually around 2 months). When an observing campaign is completed for a particular field, the multitude of data are run through software which, after correcting for many sources of distortion and noise, produces light curves for thousands of stars in the field. Other software is run to analyze the processed data for variable stars and transit candidates. It takes two or more transits (or cycles in a variable star) to discern the period of the orbit (or the variability).
I thought you'd like that. :') Sounds analogous to the large expensive systems that do the same thing. Imagine linking (via the web, perhaps?) a number of CCD scopes distributed over several states...
Thanks!
So neener, neener.
< |:)~
LOL!
They do somethng similar with radio telescopes to image, say, the surface of Venus. In a few years they will have an optical array in orbit to start looking for earthlike planets.
And a damn fine job they're doing, too.
William Bouguereau
The Birth of Venus (1879)
LOL!
It;s cool beans though. :-)
TrèS Intéressant!
More on TrES-2:
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~ftod/tres/tres2.html
I believe your link gave me the finger as it told me I'm forbidden. Yeah, it was the index finger but still...
Yeah, I think I once read that the technique was pioneered in England; two dishes on railcars, on a track a half mile long, to give results similar to a single dish of that size.
Resolution is proportional to diameter and signal strength is proportional to area. When two dishes are used the diameter becomes the distance between, but the area remains whatever the two dishes added up might be. The resolution is also proportional to wavelength, so the optical part of the EM spectrum inherently gives a much higher resolution than the radio portion.
Thanks!
forgot to ping ya.
Well put. :')
Do you mean the Kepler telescope?
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