# Tag Info

16

Amateur equipment is good enough. But you cannot detect it with a naked eye. The change in flux for a passing exoplanet in transit is roughly 1%...2% at most for the larger exoplanets - and it is a gradual change. That's a change you do not notice with the naked eye, but it needs photographic equipment to create a sequence of images which allow analysis of ...

5

Can exoplanet transits be detected visually with amateur equipment? No. The magnitude change is too small. With proper equipment, transits can be detected by amateurs. For example, American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) members are collecting data according to the page Exoplanet Section. ANNOUNCEMENT: With the launch of TESS (Transiting ...

3

Of course transits are observable with telescopes; this is the main method for detecting exoplanets, see Wikipedia's Methods of detecting exoplanets; Transit photometry. Unfortunately, they can do this only with powerful equipment. The magnitude change varies from 0 to 0.03. This can't be seen with, for example, 700 mm telescope. Thus, 70 mm telescope ...

27

I posted a few animations, just to make sure :) The image is hopefully obviously not to scale. This is possible: and is, in fact, not far from what Uranus is doing. The animation above was produced using Mathematica. The camera is above the plane of the planet's orbit, but not directly above the star. The rings are perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. ...

46

Yes, the plane of the rings of Uranus are at about 98 degrees to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. This means that the ring system looks as in your picture twice per orbit. As the planet orbits the Sun, the rings, although still inclined at 98 degrees to the orbital plane gradually become "face-on" when viewed from the Sun. This will happen ...

1

This source doesn't give sufficient information to get the length of either a stellar or sidereal day. The rotation rate of a body is not governed by the orbital parameters. The Earth, for example, has a slowing spin rate as the Moon retreats due to tidal interactions. This doesn't affect the Earth's orbital parameters. The fields given are: Name ...

1

You are comparing distributions in a way that they are not easily comparable and the eye is misled: watch the scaling of your axes of the plots you compare! In order to compare, you want to make sure that you use similar, either log-log for both graphs or linear-linear or something else - but identical in both graphs. Mind also that the size distribution of ...

2

Have the many exoplanets we've discovered in the last several decades improved our estimates of 𝑓𝑝, and 𝑛𝑐? Absolutely! The quantity $f_p n_e$ is a quantity of much interest in investigations of extrasolar planets, which effectively equates to the fraction of stars that have a habitable planet in their star's habitable zone. Plenty of studies have ...

2

Back in the "good old days" (the 1980s), a lot of discoveries were made by amateurs. Transient phenomena such as comets or supernovae were spotted by amateurs. This was possible because the bottleneck in making discoveries was the human eye and brain. You needed eyes to look at the sky, or pictures of the sky. Computers couldn't process images ...

5

Zooniverse has a citizen science project called Exoplanet Explorers that used volunteers to examine data on exoplanet candidates. It was so successful that it has now run out of data, but there are other space projects that are looking for contributors

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There are a number of methods of detecting exoplanets, but all of them favour detection of larger planets over smaller ones, albeit for slightly different definitions of large: Radial velocity measurement — this detects the small movement of the star towards and away from us as the planet and the star orbit their mutual barycenter. This movement is fastest ...

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