The European COROT telescope, launched in 2006, was the first telescope dedicated to hunting for exoplanet transits from space, where you don’t have to contend with the fluctuations in light levels caused by Earth’s atmosphere. A transit occurs when a planet passes across the face of its star, creating a small dip in the amount of starlight that reaches our telescopes. Today, the majority of known exoplanets have been discovered by looking for transits. Some of the first exoplanets were discovered by looking at the spectral lines of stars-specifically at the shift in wavelength that occurs when the gravitational pull of a planet makes its star wobble back and forth with respect to Earth. A multilayer sunshield will help the telescope reach its operating temperature, by protecting it from the heat of the sun. As a general-purpose observatory, JWST will have many targets of study, including exoplanets. Infrared Eye: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) boasts a 6.5-meter-wide mirror (yellow) that will let it pick up infrared light from a variety of sources. We now know of well over 1,000 stars that harbor one or more planets. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.Twenty-five years ago, we knew of only one solar system in the Milky Way-our own. Kepler 11: A Six-Planet Sonata from Alex Parker on Vimeo. Last year he and a colleague turned a three-year supernova search into a “ Supernova Sonata.” In that piece they assigned each of the 241 supernovae detected by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope a note based on the properties of the supernova and its host galaxy. This is not Parker’s first sonification of astronomical data. “In principle, it may never repeat perfectly,” Parker adds, “since the orbits change with time while the planets interact gravitationally with each other.” But because the planets have different orbital periods, it would take 55 years of data for the music to repeat-when the planets return (almost exactly) to their starting positions. During that time the outermost planet in the Kepler 11 system transited its star about half a dozen times, its note ringing out in Parker's piece each time the closer-in planets passed through the spacecraft’s field of view more frequently and so sound their notes more often. The minute-long piece of music draws on two years of data. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger = louder). The pitch (note) is determined by the planet's distance from its star (closer = higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. Here, I've taken each transit seen by the observatory and assigned a pitch and volume to it. (In other words, the planet’s note plays each time it passes through the Kepler spacecraft’s field of view.) Parker explains the methodology behind his “Six-Planet Sonata” on his Vimeo page: In the video, as the planets proceed through a sped-up animation of their orbits, each of those events produces the transiting planet’s signature note. The Kepler spacecraft discovers planets by identifying transits-brief, shallow eclipses in which a planet passes in front of its star and blocks a small fraction of starlight.
It also inspired one astronomer to compose a music video.Īlex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, assigned a different note to each of six planets in the Kepler 11 system. The Kepler 11 system is fascinating-it offers a glimpse of a planet-formation process that churned out a product very different from our own solar system. Last year astronomers using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft discovered six planets swarming the star, now called Kepler 11, of which five reside closer to their star than any planet orbits our sun. Unremarkable, that is, save for the dense planetary cornucopia orbiting it. About 2,000 light-years away, near the constellation Cygnus, lies a fairly unremarkable star much like our own sun.
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