Sinister Security: Exoplanet

ESO Captures First-Ever Clear Image of An Exoplanet Candidate, And It’s 11 Quadrillion km Away

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For the first time ever, ESO astronomers have been able to capture a clear image of a star system 11 quadrillion kilometers away using the combined forces of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain.

CVSO 30C STATUS PENDING

For the first time, astronomers were able to capture a clear image of an exoplanet candidate, orbiting a star known as CVSO 30, which lies around 1,200 light-years away. If validated as an exoplanet, CVSO 30c would prove that CVSO 30 has two planets orbiting it.

CVSO 30c. European Southern Observatory

European Southern Observatory (ESO) officials say this could be the first star system discovered to have both a close-in exoplanet and another one that is far-out. “If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging,” ESO officials.

In 2012, astronomers found the first exoplanet, CVSO 3b. They have found that this exoplanet is amazingly close to the star, roughly 1.2 million kilometers in distance — just 11 hours away.

On the other hand, the new exoplanet candidate orbiting it, CVSO 30c, is 98,730,000,000,000 kilometers (61,347,977,809,592 miles) away. This distance is 660 times the Earth’s distance from the sun. Given this fact, it means that one orbital period for this planet would take 27,000 years to complete, making astronomers uncertain whether the star is actually part of the star system. More observations would be necessary to confirm (or disprove) this.

“Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old; it is possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits,” ESO officials said.

11,000,000,000,000,000-KILOMETER STALKER RANGE

While CVSO 30c’s status remains undecided, what’s really wonderful about the discovery is how impressive it is that we were able to get a clear image of worlds so far away from us — CVSO 30c is 11 quadrillion kilometers (7 quadrillion miles) away from Earth.

In numerical form, T! That’s 15 zeroes!

ESO researchers worked hard building the appropriately named Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to make this happen. And that’s not even enough. They needed to combine forces with two other observatories: the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain.

And at an 11,000,000,000,000,000-kilometer stalker range, it was definitely worth it.

References: ScienceAlert - Latest

Via Futurism.

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Meet “Super Saturn:” Alien Planet Found With Staggeringly Large Ring System

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Researchers have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. This system is the first of its kind to be found outside Earth's solar system.

A SUPER SATURN

Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands and the University of Rochester in New York have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. The ring system — the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system — was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester’s Eric Mamajek.

A new analysis of the data, led by Leiden’s Matthew Kenworthy, shows that the ring system consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. Furthermore, they found gaps in the rings, which indicate that satellites (“exomoons”) may have formed. The result has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

“The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings,” says Kenworthy. “The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the starlight passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full Moon.”

“This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today,” said co-author Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.”

The astronomers analyzed data from the SuperWASP project — a survey that is designed to detect gas giants that move in front of their parent star. In 2012, Mamajek and colleagues at the University of Rochester reported the discovery of the young star J1407 and the unusual eclipses, and they proposed that they were caused by a moon-forming disk around a young giant planet or brown dwarf.

In a third, more recent study also led by Kenworthy, adaptive optics and Doppler spectroscopy were used to estimate the mass of the ringed object. Their conclusions based on these and previous papers on the intriguing system J1407 is that the companion is likely to be a giant planet — not yet seen — with a gigantic ring system responsible for the repeated dimming of J1407’s light.

MASSIVE RINGS

The light curve tells astronomers that the diameter of the ring system is nearly 120 million kilometers (~74 million miles), more than 200 times as large as the rings of Saturn. The ring system likely contains roughly an Earth’s worth of mass in light-obscuring dust particles.

Mamajek puts into context how much material is contained in these disks and rings.

“If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the Sun would see a very deep, multi-day eclipse,” Mamajek says. “In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young Sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites.”

In the data, the astronomers found at least one clean gap in the ring structure, which is more clearly defined in the new model. “One obvious explanation is that a satellite formed and carved out this gap,” says Kenworthy. “The mass of the satellite could be between that of Earth and Mars. The satellite would have an orbital period of approximately two years around J1407b.”

Astronomers expect that the rings will become thinner in the next several million years and eventually disappear as satellites form from the material in the disks.

“The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites,” Mamajek explains. “However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object.”

Astronomers estimate that the ringed companion J1407b has an orbital period roughly a decade in length. The mass of J1407b has been difficult to constrain, but it is most likely in the range of about 10 to 40 Jupiter masses.

The researchers encourage amateur astronomers to help monitor J1407, which would help detect the next eclipse of the rings, and constrain the period and mass of the ringed companion. Observations of J1407 can be reported to the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). In the meantime, the astronomers are searching other photometric surveys looking for eclipses by yet undiscovered ring systems.

Kenworthy adds that finding eclipses from more objects like J1407’s companion “is the only feasible way we have of observing the early conditions of satellite formation for the near future. J1407’s eclipses will allow us to study the physical and chemical properties of satellite-spawning circumplanetary disks.”

Provided by The University of Rochester.

References: arXiv, Rochester University

Via Futurism.

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Research Shows K2-18b Could be a Scaled-Up Version of Earth

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New research using data collected by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has revealed that a little-known exoplanet called K2-18b could well be a scaled-up version of Earth.

Image: K2-18b and its neighbor, newly discovered K2-18c, orbit the red-dwarf star k2-18 locataed 111 light years away in the constellation Leo. Illustration by Alex Boersma

Just as exciting, the same researchers also discovered for the first time that the planet has a neighbor.

“Being able to measure the mass and density of K2-18b was tremendous, but to discover a new exoplanet was lucky and equally exciting,” says lead author Ryan Cloutier, a PhD student in U of T Scarborough’s Centre for Planet Science, U of T’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Université de Montréal Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx).

Both planets orbit K2-18, a red-dwarf star located about 111 light years away in the constellation Leo. When the planet K2-18b was first discovered in 2015, it was found to be orbiting within the star’s habitable zone, making it an ideal candidate to have liquid surface water, a key element in harboring conditions for life as we know it.

The data set used by the researchers came from the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) using the ESO’s 3.6m telescope at La Silla Observatory, in Chile. HARPS allows for measurements of radial velocities of stars, which can be affected by the presence of nearby planets, to be taken with the highest accuracy currently available. The instrument makes it possible to detect very small planets orbiting those stars.

K2-18b: 'Super-Earth' that could host alien life

In order to figure out whether K2-18b was a scaled-up version of Earth ( mostly rock ), or a scaled-down version of Neptune ( mostly gas ), researchers had to first figure out the planet’s mass, using radial velocity measurements taken with HARPS.

“If you can get the mass and radius, you can measure the bulk density of the planet and that can tell you what the bulk of the planet is made of,” says Cloutier.

After using a machine-learning approach to figure out the mass measurement, Cloutier and his team were able to determine the planet is either a mostly rocky planet with a small gaseous atmosphere – like Earth, but bigger – or a mostly water planet with a thick layer of ice on top of it.

“With the current data, we can’t distinguish between those two possibilities,” he says.

“But with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) we can probe the atmosphere and see whether it has an extensive atmosphere or it’s a planet covered in water.”

The JWST, which will be launched in 2019, will be instrumental in collecting a range of data for studying the solar system, early universe and exoplanets.

“There’s a lot of demand to use this telescope, so you have to be meticulous in choosing which exoplanets to look at,” says René Doyon, a co-author on the paper who is also the principal investigator for NIRISS, the Canadian Space Agency instrument on board JWST.

“K2-18b is now one of the best targets for atmospheric study, it’s going to the near top of the list.”

It was while looking through the data of K2-18b that Cloutier noticed something unusual. In addition to a signal occurring every 39 days from the rotation of K2-18, and one taking place every 33 days from the orbit of K2-18b, he noticed a different signal occurring every nine days.

“When we first threw the data on the table we were trying to figure out what it was. You have to ensure the signal isn’t just noise, and you need to do careful analysis to verify it, but seeing that initial signal was a good indication there was another planet,” Cloutier says.

Cloutier collaborated with an international team of researchers, including his supervisor U of T Scarborough Associate Professor Kristen Menou from the Centre for Planetary Sciences, and from the Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève, the Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx), Université de Grenoble, and Universidade do Porto.

While the newly described planet K2-18c is closer to its star, and probably too hot to be in the habitable zone, like K2-18b it also appears to be a Super-Earth meaning it has a mass similar to Earth. Cloutier, who had set the goal of discovering a new exoplanet within his PhD, considers himself very lucky to have discovered it in this dataset.

“It wasn’t a eureka moment because we still had to go through a checklist of things to do in order to verify the data. Once all the boxes were checked it sunk in that, wow, this actually is a planet.”

The research, which received support from the Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Institute for Research on Exoplanets, will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

PDF copy of the Study: Characterization of the K2-18 multi-planetary system with HARPS: A habitable zone super-Earth and discovery of a second, warm super-Earth on a non-coplanar orbit

Source: Don Campbell, University Of Toronto

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Astronomers Discover Eighth Planet Circling Kepler-90

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The discovery of an eighth planet circling the distant star Kepler-90 by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Andrew Vanderburg and Google’s Christopher Shallue overturns our solar system’s status as having the highest number of known planets. We’re now in a tie.

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that “learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star.

Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin, and Shallue, a Google machine learning researcher, teamed up to train a computer to learn how to identify signs of an exoplanet in the light readings from distant stars recorded by Kepler. Similar to the way neurons connect in the human brain, this “neural network” sifted through the Kepler data to identify the weak transit signals from a previously missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, a sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco.

“For the first time since our solar system planets were discovered thousands of years ago, we know for sure that our solar system is not the sole record holder for the most planets,” Vanderburg said.

Kepler-90 is a Sun-like star, but all of its eight planets are scrunched into the equivalent distance of Earth to the Sun. The inner planets have extremely tight orbits with a “year” on Kepler-90i lasting only 14.4 days. In comparison, Mercury’s orbit is 88 days. Consequently, Kepler-90i has an average surface temperature of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and is not a likely place for life as we know it. The structure of the Kepler-90’s system hints that the eight planets around Kepler-90 may have formed more spread out, like the planets in our own solar system, and then somehow migrated to the orbits we see them in today. Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

Other planetary systems, though, would probably hold more promise for life than Kepler-90’s system, which packs all eight planets closer to the host star than Earth is to the sun. In our solar system, only Mercury and Venus orbit between our planet and our sun. About 30 percent larger than Earth, Kepler-90i is so close to its star that its average surface temperature is thought to exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, on a par with Mercury. The outermost planet, Kepler-90h, is a gas giant that is about the size of Jupiter, circling with a “year” of 331.6 days.

“The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system. You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer,” Vanderburg said.

The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

The idea to apply a neural network to Kepler data came from Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google AI, a research team at the search-engine giant in Mountain View, California. Shallue became interested in exoplanet discovery after learning that astronomy, like other branches of science, is rapidly becoming inundated with data as the technology for collecting data from space advances.

This graphic shows that a small area around the Kepler-90 system, on the left, has been searched by the Kepler space telescope. Compared to our solar system, where we know of planets farther out, it is possible that Kepler-90 has even more planets. If planets (in the blue area) do exist, they probably would not have transited enough times while Kepler was watching for us to know they were there. Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

“Machine learning really shines in situations where there is so much data that humans can’t search it for themselves,” Shallue said.

Kepler’s four-year data set, for example, consists of about 2 quadrillion possible orbits of planets. To verify the most promising signals of planets, automated tests, or sometimes human eyes, are typically used, but often the weakest signals are missed during this process. So, Shallue and Vanderburg thought there could be some more interesting exoplanet discoveries lurking in the data.

The two developed a neural network to search Kepler data for new planets. First, they trained the neural network to identify transiting exoplanets in a set of 15,000 previously vetted signals from the Kepler exoplanet catalog. Then, with the neural network having “learned” to detect the pattern of a transiting exoplanet, the researchers pointed their model at 670 star systems that already had multiple known planets and searched for weaker signals. Their assumption was that multiple-planet systems would be the best places to look for more exoplanets.

Kepler-90 had already made its mark in 2013 as the first seven-planet system identified with Kepler, but the signal from the eighth planet was so weak it was missed by previous methods.

“We got lots of false positives of planets but also potentially more real planets,” Vanderburg said. “It’s like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve, then you will catch more rocks, but you might catch more jewels as well.”

Kepler-90i wasn’t the only jewel this neural network sifted out. In the Kepler-80 system, they found a sixth planet. This one, the Earth-size Kepler-80g, and four of its neighboring planets form what is called a “resonant chain,” where the planets are locked by their mutual gravity in a rhythmic orbital dance. The result is an extremely stable system, similar to the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, so precisely balanced that the length of Kepler-80g’s year could be predicted with mathematics.

This work was performed in part under contract with the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program and executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.

Source: University of Texas

Image on the top: The Kepler-90 planets have a similar configuration to our solar system with small planets found orbiting close to their star, and the larger planets found farther away. In our solar system, this pattern is often seen as evidence that the outer planets formed in a cooler part of the solar system, where water ice can stay solid and clump together to make bigger and bigger planets. The pattern we see around Kepler-90 could be evidence of that same process happening in this system. Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel