Projects
Extrasolar Planets Transit Search
The Planetary Society is supporting an exciting project to detect Extra Solar Planets from a robotically controlled telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. This project will use the so-called transit method, to try to detect slight drop in starlight that occurs when a planet crosses in front of the star.
The Planetary Society is sponsoring the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in this endeavor, supporting their membership in a consortium of organizations working to refurbish the 50-inch (1.3 meter) telescope on Kitt Peak. In return, our Planetary Science Institute/Planetary Society partnership will have about 15% of the time on the telescope to dedicate to Extra Solar Planet searching using this innovative method.
The system is slated to fully debut sometime in 2006. The telescope is being modified to be completely robotically controlled, allowing for much more observing at lower cost. This Robotically Controlled Telescope (RCT) will be used for Extra Solar Planet searches by the PSI scientists. Planet hunting will be done by taking gigabytes of data each night for many nights. These will consist of images of star fields that are imaged over one night, then over multiple nights. Advanced software developed by PSI will carefully analyze the variations in stars' brightnesses to look for variability. Various techniques will also pull out light variability curves that look like what we'd expect from a planet, as opposed to those associated with other variable stellar phenomena.
|
[ what is this? ]