Questions tagged [exoplanet]
Questions regarding planets that lie outside the Solar System.
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Would Atlas Pro's prediction about the color of plant in Kepler-186F work as a biosignature to search for life?
The Atlas Pro video that prompted this question is this.
Tl;dr: it is argued that due to the different spectrum of radiation emitted by Kepler-186 and what is known about the evolution of ...
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1answer
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Calculate the habitable zone of a star based on NASA Exoplanet Archive
I am completely new to this! I am trying to find if an exoplanet in the Exoplanet Archive is the habitable zone of its host star. My intention is to create a new boolean column in a Pandas Dataframe ...
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Could rogue planets harbor life?
On July 21 at 10 am, Seti Talks will be discussing the topic of "Could Rogue Planets Harbor Life". Supposedly there are 50 billion such planets in the Milky Way. I would think that the ...
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1answer
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From Proxima b, could any planets around Sol be imaged directly by a strong telescope? If so, which ones would be easiest to spot?
How strong would a telescope (and what kind of telescope) on Proxima Centauri b have to magnify to discern any planets around Sol, and which planets would be easiest to spot? One might think the ...
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1answer
53 views
Special case of rotation period
Rotation period is either prograde, like the Earth, or retrograde, like Venus. How likely is it for a body orbiting its parent object (either a planet around a star or a moon around a planet) to have ...
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.fits Files for Exoplanets
I am learning to use AstroImageJ software. And using this software to plot transit graph for Exoplanet orbiting the star. I want to know from where can we find the .fits file of target star ? I tried ...
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What is the most grazing exoplanet transit that has been reported with high confidence?
The abstract of Past, present and future stars that can see Earth as a transiting exoplanet reads:
In the search for life in the cosmos, transiting exoplanets are currently our best targets. With ...
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Planets around O-type stars [duplicate]
The paper https://arxiv.org/abs/0707.2895 says that solid planets up to thousands of Earth masses may be able to form around massive stars (B-type and O-type stars; 5–120 solar masses), where the ...
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1answer
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Axial tilt of exoplanets
Some directly imaged exoplanets have had their rotation measured but has the axial tilt of any exoplanet been measured? If not, when might we get the first measurement of axial tilt of an exoplanet?
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Will we ever be able to see the surface of exoplanets directly?
When exoplanets are depicted, artist's impressions are used. The presence of exoplanets is observed by a dip in the emitted power of a star when a planet moves between us and the star (a kind of star ...
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1answer
118 views
Star brightness data to study exoplanets with the transit method?
Can someone tell me how I can find the star brightness data to study exoplanet using transit method? The file should be in comma separated value (CSV) format or any other formats that can be latter ...
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1answer
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Is the transition between ice giants and Jupiter-like gas giants somewhat fluid?
The ice giants Uranus and Neptune are often being distinguished from Saturn and Jupiter who consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, while the ice giants have more of heavier elements than hydrogen and ...
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1answer
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Retrograde orbits of exoplanets
Some Hot Jupiters have retrograde orbits. What causes this? Are there any other common factors amongst the planets with these orbits and have any other types of exoplanet been found with retrograde ...
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2answers
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Spin-down of gas-giants during formation
In the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00457 about rotation rates of gas giants it says:
"owing to accumulation of angular
momentum stored in the source material, a planetary mass object should ...
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1answer
80 views
Why does one presume that there is at least one Earth-like exoplanet around one in five stars?
When reading the question about the first use of the term exoplanet (about which Giordano Bruno and Isaac Newton already speculated but they didn't use that term for them, I think), I searched a ...
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What does it mean for a planet to have an “icy” core?
My understanding of the physics of planets leans heavily on my understanding of the physics of stars - of course there are important differences.
One important difference that I've found is the nature ...
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Why did Gemini Planet Imager hardly detect anything?
GPI was originally thought able to directly image tens of planets but so far has only discovered one new planet?
Why is this?
From Gemini Observatory; Adaptive optics
Source
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1answer
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Could a heavy exoplanet squeeze water into being liquid and 4° warm?
Let's say there is an exoplanet orbiting its host star well outside its habitable zone. Suppose further that it has a lot of water, being perhaps comparable to earth when it comes to the volume ratio ...
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Super-puff exoplanets
Super-puffs are gas giant sized planets with masses only a few earth masses.
What causes planets to form with such low density and why are they so rare?
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1answer
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Were K2-141b and WASP-63b selected as the first two exoplanet atmospheres for JWST to look at during its first year of observations? If so, why?
In The Observatory @Donald.McLean linked to Scientists will peer at first galaxies with James Webb telescope which says in part:
The new telescope will augment science performed by Hubble, not ...
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2answers
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How close to a host star can a tidally locked planet be and its dark side still maintain a moderate temperature?
So, imagine an atmosphere-less planet, tidally locked to a sun-like star. How close to the star can the planet be before its dark side becomes too hot?
I imagine that at some point the rocks on its ...
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1answer
69 views
Planetary tails: How many have we observed yet?
Just recently I learned that Mercury has a sodium tail and it is actually well studied since long:
As a result, the planet has the appearance of a comet, with a tail that's been observed streaming ...
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Crust thick enough to prevent volcanos
Could you have an Earth-like planet with a crust thick enough to prevent volcanos from forming?
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Is the measurement of distance and position of remote celestial bodies accurate?
Considering that light is affected by gravity, how accurate are measurements of distant stars and galaxies?
When light passes through objects with great mass, such as Jupiter size planets, stars, or ...
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Is the measurement of distance and position of far away objects accurate? [duplicate]
Considering that light is affected by gravity, how accurate are our measurements of distant stars and galaxies?
When light passes through objects with great mass, such as Jupiter size planets, or ...
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1answer
50 views
Are accretion disks the only way stellar planetary systems form?
The accepted theory for the formation of our Solar System is from an accretion disk. A molecular cloud is thought to have collapsed under its own gravity and formed a disk. Most of the matter in the ...
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Is the discovery of a “mass gap” black hole by this tiny telescope just plain luck/serendipity or could it be the first of many similar discoveries?
The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope is a pair of modest lenses with high quality medium format CCDs attached sitting on oversized mounts in Arizona and Sutherland.
These very modest instruments ...
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If all the Trappist-1 planets are tidally locked, which ones may have temperate zones?
Since all the Trappist-1 planets have circular orbits, it is entirely likely that all them are tidally locked.
If so, which ones of the planets may have temperate zones either on the bright or dark ...
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1answer
77 views
IAU 2018 Exoplanet definition
In 2018 the IAU produced a definition of an exoplanet:
The current official wokring definition of an exoplanet as amended by IAU Comission F2: Exoplanets and the Solar System in August 2018, reads as ...
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1answer
61 views
Lightkurve nan values after bin light curve
I am using lightkurve 2.0.2 library with Python 3.8.5 and astropy 4.2 for processing exoplanet transits. However when I want to bin light curve to fixed number of points, all values in ...
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1answer
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Why was Neptune rather than Uranus chosen as an archetype?
The largest exoplanets are typically called Jupiter-like planets, or hot/cold Jupiters. Since Jupiter is the largest most massive planet in our Solar system, it makes sense that it would be chosen as ...
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2answers
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Would it be possible to detect a magnetic field around an exoplanet?
Of course, we can't fly a magnetometer next to an exoplanet to measure the magnetic field, but might it be possible to find indirect evidence (e.g. polar auroras) of a magnetic field generated by an ...
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Strange matter objects other than neutron stars?
This question is about celestrial objects which are composed by exotic matter, and exotic matter I define as
states of matter that are not commonly encountered such as Bose–Einstein condensates, ...
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2answers
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When examining an exoplanet's atmosphere is the star's emission spectra or planet's light used?
My understanding of the main method we use to figure out an exoplanet atmosphere composition is that when a exoplanet transits their sun, visible light passes through the planet's atmosphere, and ...
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1answer
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How to track orbit of an exoplanet?
I was wondering if there is an established method to keep track of the orbit of an exoplanet assuming we know a - the semi-major axis of the orbit, e - the eccentricity of the orbit, and i - the ...
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1answer
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Exoplanet dip in transit light curve when the planet passes behind the star
In the animation below, I don't understand why the brightness slightly decreases when the planet is behind the star.
Where does this effect come from?
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1answer
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Eccentricity of Exoplanets
The field of astrobiology specifically discovering other planets that revolve around the sun-like star (also known as Exoplanets) has risen since 1990, but certain orbits of exoplanets are observed to ...
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New method for exoplanet detection?
Could it be possible to detect exoplanets that have an abundance of iridescent minerals by analyzing their star's spectra over time as the angle in observation would lead to changes in absorbed ...
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Using the 'exoplanet' module to fit a radial velocity curve for a binary star system
As part of a project, I am trying to fit a radial velocity curve using the tutorial for the binary star system (EBLM J0608-59) My code is quite similar to the tutorial, but as it is only one body ...
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1answer
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What are the challenges in finding Earth-like planets via the radial velocity method?
[I have re-asked this, because it was a good question by @Banyan, which was deleted whilst I was composing an answer.]
Most exoplanets that are found by the radial velocity ("Doppler wobble")...
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1answer
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Did we find any exo–dwarf-planet?
We have discovered thousands of exoplanets so far. Do we categorize them into planets and dwarf planets, too?
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1answer
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Why does the exoplanetary system TOI-178 challenges current theories of planet formation?
I am excited reading the news about ESA's latest exoplanet discovery using CHEOPS. The system TOI-178 consists of (at least?) five planets, following a 18:9:6:4:3 pattern. In the press release, the ...
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4answers
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Why can't we build a huge stationary optical telescope inside a depression similar to the FAST?
So first we'll have to find a natural depression or we should create one. I understand you can only see a single portion of the sky since it can't be moved, so my money is on creating an artificial ...
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Abundance of penitente ice formations in the solar system
When researching for my question on extraterresitral snow, I learned about a rare snow formation called penitente which seems to be found on various (dwarf) planets, like Earth, Mars, and Pluto. ...
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Extraterrestrial snow?
What do we know about extraterrestrial snow? On which (exo)planets or (exo)moons do we have direct hints for its existance? This is indeed a children's question, but I struggle to answer it ...
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3answers
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Can we visually perceive exoplanet transits with amateur telescopes?
Is it possible for an amateur astronomer to visually perceive an exoplanet transit by the change of brightness of the star via observations spaced over time, or is the variation of the brightness too ...
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2answers
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Is it possible for planetary rings to be perpendicular (or near perpendicular) to the planet's orbit around the host star?
Is it possible for planetary rings to be perpendicular (or near perpendicular) to the planet's orbit around the host star?
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1answer
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Calculating the Solar Day of an Exoplanet?
I am currently in the process of compiling a list of stars and their planets, given the information in the European Star Catalogue found here, but I'm struggling to find out how to calculate a planets ...
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1answer
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Why doesn't star size distribution conform to space rock size distribution?
The number of space rocks is exponentially related to the size of the rocks. There are more small space rocks than big ones. Stars are most commonly the size of the sun, big and smaller stars are rare,...
