How Will We Know What Kepler’s Finding?
Now that the Kepler mission is on its way to final orbit and commissioning, astronomers are excited about the possibilities for new planets to be found “out there” in the nearest 3,000 light-years of space. It’s worth remembering, however, that the Kepler spacecraft will be identifying planetary “possibilities” — that is, it will study star fields over time; in its data will be stars that appear to flicker.
The Kepler folk have a very cool interactive page that helps you understand how the spacecraft does its search (note, the link leads to a Flash-activated site), but essentially it looks for those flickers of star light and then relays that information to scientists for further study. There are thousands of stars to look at, so once Kepler commences on its official search mission, the datasets could be quite large. And who knows what we’ll find out there?
There are several possibilities about what causes stars to flicker, and only one of them is a planetary system. A star could flicker because it’s variable – that is, it has some intrinsic (exclusive to itself) mechanism that causes its luminosity to brighten and dim on a regular schedule. All those stars will be of great interest to folks who study variables — including the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
Another possibility might be gravitational lensing events. These occur when something massive passes between us and a more distant object. Of course we’re familiar with gravitational lensing by distant galaxy clusters, but it can happen that something will do the same thing to a star in our own galaxy, causing its light output to appear to flicker. The late scientist Bohdan Paczy?ski was quite interested in such events, and the OGLE survey (among others) does real time studies of such events in our galaxy.
So, before Kepler scientists can confidently state that they’ve found a planet around another star, they have to take into account those other possibilities.
Once they think they’ve got a candidate, that’s when people like Geoff Marcy (of the University of California at Berkeley) step in and observe those stars using observatories such as the W.M. Keck telescopes in Hawai’i.
They essentially look for planets that are “transiting” the disks of the stars — that is, they pass in front of the star from our point of view. That transit causes the flicker of starlight that betrays the existence of a planet.
The Keck team, headed by Marcy, will start looking for planetary candidates using Kepler data starting in late July of this year. So, keep your eyes open for news from the exoplanet front. It’s bound to be interesting!
it would be alot easier for all of you as i have told people for months, that you can find and look at planets instantly with resonance imaging and looking for electromagnetic resonance signeratures of electremagnospheres of planets and to find life you could look for the electrochemical resonance signeratures of life that have 5-6 or more atom combinations just like mans dna CHNOPO.
using resonance imaging, allows unlimited zoom down to the last particle and even behind and around objects even outside the universe itself.
if you want results this is the only way to get it and to watch life forms and photograph them on the surface, otherwise if you keep using telescopes, all those shadows and wobbles wont mean anything until real videos and photos are taken of REAL PLANETS.
signed dm.
Okay, so please back up “what you’ve been telling us for months” with some cold, hard facts about just HOW this method would be deployed. Does it work on ground-based telescopes? IF so, how? Is it an orbital instrument? If so, what’s its sensitivity range? More details, please. Anybody can be an idea person, but the devil is in the details — and that’s how science works.