Questions tagged [planetary-transits]
For questions about transits of planets in front of the Sun, as seen from another, more distant planet; for example, the transits of Mercury and Venus which are visible from the Earth.
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If Alpha Centauri A's solar system exactly mirrored our own, what would we be able to detect?
Suppose there was an exact replica of our solar system 4.4 ly away (people included). What would we be able to detect and with what telescope(s)? Which planets? Could we detect radio transmissions and/...
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Can a planet in our system eclipse the sun as seen from another one?
When the Sun, Earth and Moon get properly aligned, we get eclipses, where the Sun is partially or totally hidden by the Moon when seen from Earth.
Is it possible for one planet of the solar system to ...
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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?
user16492
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Is it possible to see mercury transit "clearly" by the naked eye?
I don't have a telescope but I'm interested in seeing events like eclipses and transits.
I'll use the atmosphere as my big natural lens. So I'll watch the upcoming mercury transit at the sunset time ...
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Are there ever any simultaneous transits of both Mercury and Venus as seen from the Earth?
Transits of Mercury happen fairly frequently due to its short period, but transits of Venus are less frequent. I've looked over the data available to me and found that there have been transits of ...
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How (the heck) was this photo of Venus at inferior conjunction (between us and the Sun) taken?
This great answer by @gerrit discussing planetary phases seen in visible light contains the image I've included below. According to the Wikimedia Commons link these are ESO images from the Venus ...
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How does an eclipse differ from an occultation?
A comment in response to this question suggests that an eclipse differs from an occultation in that the former casts a shadow while the latter doesn't.
This isn't particularly satisfactory since ...
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Why do transits of Earth across the Sun seen from Mars follow a pattern of occurring after 26, 79 then 100 years?
According to this answer transits of Earth across the disk of the Sun as seen from Mars:
The (Arthur C.) Clarke story is quite correct. Earth (and Moon) would transit the sun from the viewpoint of ...
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Is one transit enough to be confident that we detected an exoplanet
Everything is pretty much in the title. I was thinking about the transit method and was wondering if the signature of a transit on the light curve of a star is distinctive enough to only need one ...
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Can the period of the planet transit across the sun be calculated in the same way the eclipse year is?
I read from Wikipedia$-$Eclipse cycle that the eclipse year, which is the period of Earth's hitting a certain node of its orbit around the sun, that is, the ecliptic, and the moon's orbit around Earth,...
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Can lunar occultation of Venus occur during solar eclipse?
Moon can occult Venus. Venus can transit across the solar disc. Moon can elipse Sun. Can all three celestial events occur at the same time - Moon is at front of Sun (partial eclipse is fine) and Venus ...
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How do scientists differentiate between a total and a partial transit of a planet passing in front of its star?
Say there's a star in our local neighborhood with a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting around it. This planet's orbit happens to lie approximately in our line-of-sight – we can only see a quarter of it ...
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Get orbital period of exoplanet from light curve using astropy.timeseries
I am using astropy and I would like to calculate orbital period of an exoplanet by its star's light curve. I follow tutorial in astropy docs and I use data from Kepler in Nasa Exoplanet Archive.
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Watching the Mercury transit with improvised devices
I have learned that it is not possible to watch the upcoming Mercury transit with the plain eye (using special filter glasses).
Is it possible to watch the transit with improvised devices (like a ...
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Did simultaneous transits of Mercury and Venus actually last occur in 373,173 BC?
According to the Wikipedia article for Transit of Venus, the last time a transit of Mercury and a transit of Venus occurred at the same time was 22 September of 373,173 BC. This is a Featured Article ...
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Pinhole Projector: Can I use a specific solar optical eye piece to focus the Transit of Mercury?
The title pretty much explains this one. Can I use a specific solar optical eye piece, or other optical device, in conjunction with the pinhole projector method to focus the Transit of Mercury?
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Why was the size of the solar system not defined by Mercury Transits?
The first measurements of the (absolute) size of the solar system was made using the Transit of Venus, an event that arguably will only happen twice in a lifetime.
Transits of Mercury occur far more ...
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How could one use the transit of Mercury to try and find the Astronomical Unit?
I am trying to use the transit of Mercury to estimate the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or 1 AU.
I know that I need to observe mercury from two antipodes, but I do not understand any of ...
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When are the planets occulted by the sun?
There are numerous lists available of past and future planetary transits and occultations, but I can't find any that list transits behind the sun.
Do the planets in our solar system ever pass ...
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When will the next transit of Earth be visible from Mars? Was the last one really on May 11, 1984?
@PM2Ring's comment mentions the story Transit of Earth written by the famous British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist,3 inventor, undersea explorer, television series host, Fellow ...
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How do we know the order of the new Trappist-1 planets?
Using transit photometry astronomers were able to discover Trappist b through h. Based on this question we learn that the naming of planets is based on their distance from their star (b being the ...
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Probability of transit of an exoplanet in front of its star
I'm trying to calculate the probability of transit of an exoplanet in orbit around a star of diameter $d$, at a distance of $4d$ from its centre. Here's what I did:
In this figure, we are only ...
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(How) Can one determine if an exoplanet is synchronously tidally locked or not? [duplicate]
Mercury is asynchronously tidally locked so that all of its surface regularly sees the Sun. But an exoplanet which is synchronously locked to its star, could we tell that it is? It would have a hot ...
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How does a Solar Transit give more accurate determination of Earth-to-Sun distance?
I understand how Solar Parallax calculation determines the Earth-Sun distance using measurements of (a) the baseline distance between two widely-separated terrestrial telescopes and the (b) two angles ...
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How do astronomers know if a planet is orbiting a star, or it's simply another star in the background?
For example, if astronomers photograph a "planet", which is in close proximity to a given star, then this "planet", could actually just be another "star" in the background, many light years away.
It ...
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Is it possible to tell if a certain extrasolar planet produces its own magnetic field?
I know by observing the dimness of a star it is possible to calculate an exoplanet's distance from the star and its mass by how much the star wobbles. However, is there any way to accurately determine ...
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How often does the configuration of the Trappist-1 system repeat
My question is simply how long it takes for the 7 known planets in Trappist-1 to be in the same configuration in relation to their host star, and to each-other. Those seven planets are in a 2:3:4:6:9:...
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How can a Grade-11 Student avail TESS data and learn to process?
As mentioned, I am a Grade-11 student. I have always been interested in Data Processing activities. This sums up my experience of working on Asteroid hunt Campaign under IASC (International Asteroid ...
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Accuracy of Mercury transit calculations
What is the error range for calculations for the time of 1st-4th contacts for a given GPS coordinate on Earth?
I observed through a telescope the 3rd and 4th contacts and compared against SkySafari ...
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What's the influence of a tilted orbital plane, when observing an exoplanet transit?
I made an illustration to explain what i mean : If we assume we have two similar planet/star systems (similars in size/mass/period..) but tilted differently relative to us.
How can we predict that ...
user16500
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When was the atmosphere of Venus first observed?
Nowadays, atmospheres of transiting exoplanets are being characterized. We can measure the absorption of the star's light through the exosphere of exoplanets.
The same can be done closer to Earth, ...
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Accurate formula for calculating the mass of an exoplanet using the transit method
A friend and I did some work on exoplanets with the help of a research institute (IEEC in Spain) for a major high school project. What we did was to "redetect" the exoplanet XO-6b through ...
user45319
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constructing a transit light curve [duplicate]
What type of equipment would I need to construct a transit light curve of a planet. It doesn't have to be an exoplanet. If somebody could chuck a list that would be really helpful.
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Challenge with a Transit Method Curve
My assignment is to identify how many planets are in this curve and what the orbital period is. I'm just confused on the way it looks, as most curves I've seen up to this date are more smooth and ...
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Capability of observing transits with terrestrial telescopes of various sizes?
I have access to my university's telescope, Dearborn Observatory, an 18.5 inch refractor on the shore of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago (yes, it's an atrocious location, but the telescope still ...
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Detection of exo-planets
One method used for detecting exo-planets is to look for a slight dip in the parent star's luminosity as the planet transits the stellar disc. Intuitively, it seems to me that if planetary systems in ...
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A few questions regarding the transit of planets
Here we will be concerning ourselves with the transit of a planet with it's parent sun.
I have a few questions that I am not sure about:
1) Do all planets transit their parent sun? It would seem to ...
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Pinhole projector for the Transit of Mercury
Very quick and simple one today. What would be the best/optimal pinhole size for a pinhole projector to observe the transit of Mercury on May 9th?
I want to get the optimum between resolution and ...
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Venus transiting behind the Earth’s moon December 7, 2015
Observing from Earth what are the odds that Venus does not line up in conjunction with Earth’s moon and does not transit behind the moon but slightly below or above with a complete visual of Venus ...
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Fourier analysis of exoplanet transit to determine the number of planets in the system
Although I think that this can be done by simply looking at the transit graph, I was wondering if a Fourier transform of a transit (basically transforming transit depth/amplitude vs time graph to ...
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Occultation of planets by other planets
Two Keplerian closed orbits always intersect:
Source: Astronomy SE answer by Flater
As seen from Earth, Venus appears larger than Mercury; this makes sense because Venus is both larger and closer ...
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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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Guess inclination angle from radial velocity measurements
I came upon this question where the situation is I have radial velocity measurements of a star with two circular orbiting exoplanets and the question is how to find out if the inclination angles of ...
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Can a telescope be built to focus on a point source star?
If a Kepler telescope were built to focus on one point source star at a time, would it provide more information, or did Kepler capture virtually every photon from any given star anyway?
In order to ...
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Why aren't all planets in the same plane?
Obviously all planets are not in same perfect plane. Because if at all they were in the exact same plane, it would mean that Mercury transits and Venus transits would not be that rare.
Any ...
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Does the reflected light from Earth boost Venus' apparent magnitude when it is seen transiting the Sun?
During solar transits of Venus as seen from Earth, exactly 0% of Venus' disk is illuminated by sunlight, as expected. However during these transits, Earth is at opposition and fully illuminated by the ...
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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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What percentage of habitable-zone planets are detectable by transit?
I realize that the probability of detecting a planet by transit depends on the size of the star, the size of the planet's orbit, and the size of the planet; and ranges from ~10% to a small fraction of ...
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Occurrence of Venusian transits
As transits of Venus come in pairs, each separated by 8 years, wouldn't that imply an accurate ratio between Earth's and Venus' revolution period? I've found the ratio to be about 0.681. I presume one ...
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How to calculate the limb darkening $\mu$ value
I am reading about limb darkening and I am very confused how to find the value of $\mu$.
It states it can be found by $\mu = \cos(\gamma)$, but I am lost how $\gamma$ is found, or what it represents.
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