Questions tagged [exoplanet]
Questions regarding planets that lie outside the Solar System.
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Why would a tidally-locked rocky planet have a first-order spherical harmonic surface temperature distribution?
The new Letter to Nature Absence of a thick atmosphere on the terrestrial exoplanet LHS 3844b (also ArXiv) analyzes the thermal infrared light curve from the system (about 4.5 to 5.5 um). The planet ...
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1answer
168 views
View of other planets from the Earth
There appears to be varying positions/spots of view of other planets from Earth, if I'm not wrong. Now, given that all planets are on the same plane, why do their positions change on the night sky for ...
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2answers
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Why are there no photos of exoplanets?
There are a lot of photos of diffrent astronomial objects such as galaxies, nebulae and stars of which some are very far away.
However there are no real photos of exoplanets (by “real photos” I mean ...
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1answer
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Any plans for TESS after it finishes northern sky survey?
TESS has provided the astronomy community with a treasure trove of information.
Once TESS completes its one year survey of the northern sky, are there any plans for an extended mission?
Just seems ...
6
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1answer
134 views
How would water-ammonia oceans behave?
Scientists strongly suspect that several moons in our solar system have frozen-over oceans of water-ammonia mixture. I've also read speculations on the possibility of surface water-ammonia oceans on ...
3
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1answer
56 views
periodic inclination change circumbinary planet
I am studying circumbinary planets and I made a python model to calculate certain properties of the orbits, and when I calculate the inclination I get a sine wave.
I do not see a way to predict the ...
0
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1answer
36 views
Plot SuperWasp Lightcurves
I am trying to plot superwasp lightcurves in python from the fits files, using TMID and FLUX2, getting this:
There is a way to transform the information so I can plot the lightcurves with the kepler ...
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0answers
82 views
How Reliable is Bode's Law?
Is Bode's Law just a series of remarkable coincidences,or would it hold good for other solar systems where the star is similar to our sun?
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How actively is Deep Learning being used in exoplanet identification?
Papers, like this one from Google, show that Deep Learning and Machine Learning are effective in detecting exoplanets from luminosity data provided by telescopes like TESS or Kepler.
These models ...
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What maintains the high orbital eccentricity of many exo-planets near their sun?
Over the last decade we've discovered that many exoplanets not only have highly eccentric orbits, but also orbit very close to their sun. This is true of many classes of stars.
I definitely have a ...
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2answers
109 views
Are exoplanets which are above escape velocity of particular interest?
I was perusing the exoplanet database and looking for some of the more extreme orbits, when I happened upon HD 20782 B:
http://exoplanets.org/detail/HD_20782_b
Which is also listed (in two sentences)...
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1answer
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Could an Earth-like magnetic field protect life at exoplanet Proxima Centauri b?
I took a look at Wikipedia's page for Proxima Centauri b, the exoplanet that orbits Proxima Centauri, where it is said it is expected to receive 2000 times of stellar wind pressures than on Earth.
It ...
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4answers
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Is it plausible for a planet that is positioned in the habitable area of a solar system to have little extractable metals?
I am big fan of Asimov's Foundation and I am wondering about the plausibility of some of Foundation's imagined words.
According to this article Terminus was a special world with little metals:
It ...
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0answers
61 views
Why does the number of extrasolar planets vary in different sources?
There are at least three catalogues that are counting up-to-date discovered exoplanets. What criteria do they use to count the number of planets? Every catalogue has a different count value.
So at ...
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0answers
42 views
Frequency of Earth type cores?
I've read many interesting threads concerning the composition of different planet cores in the solar system while trying to see if this question has already been asked. It appears as if Earth is ...
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1answer
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At what annual rate are new exoplanets being recognized? How does it compare to new asteroids?
I just read the BBC News article Exoplanet tally set to pass 4,000 mark
. It makes me wonder about the annual rate that new exoplanets being recognized, and how it compares to the rate of new ...
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1answer
61 views
Compare this planet to Earth and determined its habitability (can humans live in this environment?) [closed]
I'm given this set of data and I need to describe the habitability. Would this not be habitable since the temperature of the albedo and the equilibrium is similar to Earth's or does the Spectral Type ...
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1answer
62 views
What's fixed in Ariel that is moving in other planet-hunting space telescopes?
The BBC News article UK will lead European exoplanet mission says:
Steady platform
And one aspect that would work in Ariel's favour is the absence of any moving parts in its build, commented ...
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2answers
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How to calculate the argument of perihelion for exoplanets with incomplete orbital elements?
I'm trying to simulate the Kepler-444 exoplanetary system using data from this website. The problem is that there is no argument of periapsis parameter for the Kepler-444 system, so while I think I'm ...
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1answer
608 views
Is there any habitable exoplanet around Tau Ceti?
I was wondering.. is there any habitable exoplanet around Tau Ceti?
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90 views
How do we know that an exoplanet is tidally locked to the parent star?
Often in discussing exoplanets we hear that they are close to the parent star (usually a red dwarf) but then there's a caveat that the planet is tidally locked to that star and that that fact severely ...
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1answer
84 views
What happened to the third planet in the Kepler-47 system?
In 2012, the discovery paper for the multiplanet circumbinary system Kepler-47 mentioned a potential third transiting planet in the system:
A 0.2% deep transit-like event is present at time 2,455,...
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1answer
104 views
What’s the closest earth like planet we have discovered in our galaxy? [closed]
What’s the closest earth like planet or moon to earth we have discovered in our galaxy?
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1answer
92 views
Is Naboo's core possible in real life?
In Star Wars, the planet Naboo has a plasma core, instead of a molten one.
Can a planet really have a plasma core?
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1answer
65 views
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observing modes
I have been reading some literature on using the HST to take spectra of exoplanet atmospheres when exoplanets transit in front of their stars. The literature mention two modes of observations, '...
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35 views
Doppler Spectroscopy - Finding mass of an exoplanet
An astronomer, T observed the spectrum of a distant star X. The spectral lines were observed to have tiny blueshifts and redshifts regularly with a period of 1.27 years. T concluded that the star is ...
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Is a precession rate of -0.67 radians/orbit plausible?
I came across the paper Rodin & Starovoit (2018) about the possible existence of a planet around the pulsar PSR B0525+21, which suggests the existence of a 0.387 Earth mass planet with the ...
3
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1answer
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Gas Giant temperatures
Sudarsky's gas giant classification predicts the visual appearance of gas giant planets based on their temperatures.
But what determines their temperatures in the first place? Is it just the ...
4
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1answer
56 views
Largest non-hot gas giants
Excluding 'fluffy' or 'puffy' gas giants that are 'inflated by heat from their stars, what is the maximum radius of a gas giant planet. I keep reading things like "...Jupiter is 'about' as big as ...
3
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1answer
168 views
Calculate the orbital phase when plotting the Radial Velocity data of a transitting exoplanet
I'm not quite sure how I find the orbital phase ($\phi$) of a transitting exoplanet. For example, I have this RV data in this article:
First of all, I don't know how that phase or "cycles" is ...
6
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1answer
80 views
Plausible reason for the Hot Neptune gap
This NASA article talks about how there's a dearth of hot neptune exoplanets that have been discovered so far.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/in-search-of-missing-worlds-hubble-finds-a-...
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2answers
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How can we learn the inclination of the orbiting plane of the exoplanets using radial speed method?
I heard about the radial speed method to discover exoplanets a few years ago, however, these questions kept confusing me. If we know a planet star of mess $m$ is orbiting a star by interpreting the ...
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1answer
70 views
How are exoplanets with 10,000 day periods discovered with the radial velocity method?
The radial velocity technique has apparently been used to discover exoplanets with extremely long orbital periods of ~10,000 days. For example, see this link:
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech....
2
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0answers
30 views
Orbital plane evolution and planet discovery via transit method [duplicate]
I'm aware that our solar system is largely/roughly on a single orbital plane, but haven't other star system's orbital planes been scrambled by billions of years of interaction?
If so - how much ...
4
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1answer
81 views
Could an ultra-hot Jupiter flare?
Some of the ultra-hot Jupiters (WASP-33b, KELT-9b) have dayside surface temperatures similar to low-mass stars. Would they be capable of producing flares? To be specific, I am asking about the ...
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0answers
91 views
Distance between two planets [closed]
Planet A and Planet B orbit a sun-like star. Planet A has a semi-major axis of 1 AU from the star. Planet B has an albedo of .8 and has the same radius as Jupiter. When Planet B is observed from ...
8
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1answer
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Estimates for “undetectable” planets in extra-solar systems
As far as I've been able to determine, it appears there are some significant limitations on our ability to detect exo-planets that are below certain sizes or beyond certain distances from their stars....
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1answer
80 views
Would you get the same planet-discovering data for our own system at the same distance we're getting from Earth?
So there's a boatload of planets being discovered around stars in our solar neighborhood.
Kepler 22, 638 ly away, was discovered to have a planet Kepler 22b, calculated to be twice the size of Earth.
...
2
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2answers
90 views
Where is the exomoon? (Possible discovery of a companion to Kepler-1625b)
The new paper in Science Advances Evidence for a large exomoon orbiting Kepler-1625b (open access!) uses a sophisticated combination of occultation light curve simulation, signal processing and ...
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2answers
61 views
Exoplanet radius density relation according to NASA exoplanet archive
I downloaded the info from NASA exoplanet archive at: https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=compositepars
I named the file "NASA.Composite....
2
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1answer
71 views
Low mass cut-off for the Dharma Planet Survey's detection of habitable planets around 40 Eridani A?
News of the discovery of a potentially habitable planet around the star 40 Eridani A (about 16 light-years away) is interesting for reasons including a 1991 letter described below in Sky & ...
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2answers
374 views
Currently proposed ways to distinguish between a really big planet and a really small star
The Next Big Future article Rogue Exoplanet 12.7 times bigger than Jupiter is 20 light years away
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have made ...
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2answers
98 views
What percentage of gas giant exoplanets are in the habitable zone?
Approximately what percent of exoplanet gas giants discovered so far are in the habitable zones of their stars? I hear that most of them are "Hot Jupiters", orbiting so close to their stars that the ...
3
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1answer
80 views
Number of planets in a habitable zone with large moons [closed]
Excluding gas giants, roughly what percentage of planets in the habitable zones of their stars would have large moons like Earth does, as opposed to Mars and its small moons/captured asteroids?
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Can aliens possibly be around us?
I've heard somewhere that when we observe distant galaxies, we actually look into the past. For example, if a planet is 3 million light years away from us, it means that we observe its state as it was ...
3
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1answer
112 views
Helium discovered on an exo planet
Why is there so much excitement over helium having been discovered on an exoplanet? Isn't it oxygen that we should be looking for, since this is what is needed for life? What do we need helium for?
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1answer
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Is there any difference among exoplanets in composition due to host star?
Simply put, would, say, rocky planets orbiting red dwarfs have a noticably different chemical makeup than rocky planets orbiting B-type main sequence stars? Mutatis mutandis gas giants and the other ...
4
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1answer
136 views
What makes an exoplanet to orbit around its star backwards?And why did we consider our orbital movement to be forward?
I read somewhere that an exoplanet in the name of HAT-P-7B orbits its star backwards.Why?
And why did we consider our orbital movement to be forward?Is there some scientific reason to consider the ...
2
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1answer
58 views
Help me identify a cluster [closed]
as I was browsing Nasa's Eyes few days ago, I saved a screenshot, but it seems text is blurrry, supher-485, first letter is S ends with er-485 from as I can read
it kinda looked like Cosmic Web, ...
4
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2answers
413 views
Detecting habitable planets
From my understanding we detect planets by measuring dips in light intensity from the star the habitable planet is orbiting when it passes by it.
There are 2 things I don’t understand about this ...
