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Exoplanets
Article in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences · January 2011
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Exoplanets
Sethanne Howard
USNO, Retired
Abstract
Are there planets around other stars? This question finally has been answered
in our lifetime. The answer is a very definite yes! However, most of the
planets detected to date are large, Jupiter-mass or greater. The question we
would really like to answer is: Are there Earth-like planets in a habitable
zone around other stars? In other words, are we alone? That question is much
more difficult to answer. But, we are making progress towards that goal. An
extra-solar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside our Solar System. There
are well over 500 candidate extra-solar planets identified as of May 6, 2011.
Introduction
THE SEARCH FOR OTHER PLANETS and the search for other life are of
long standing interest to humanity. “’Tis not probable we are the only
fools in the universe,” is a quote from Entretiens sur la pluralité des
mondes by de Fontenelle in 1686. People often speculated on other life
and planets.
The centuries-old quest for other worlds like our Earth has been
rejuvenated by the intense excitement and popular interest surrounding the
discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars.
There is now clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of
exoplanets: gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice
giants. The following website tracks the day-by-day increase in new
discoveries and provides information on the characteristics of the planets
as well as those of the stars they orbit: The Extra-solar Planets
Encyclopedia at http://exoplanets.eu.
There are a few general questions we can address right away. Perhaps
the first one is: what is a planet? Among other duties the International
Astronomical Union (IAU) is the governing body for naming and defining
astronomical objects as established by international treaty. The official
definition of “planet” used by the IAU only covers the Solar System and
thus takes no stance on exoplanets. As of April 2011, the only definitional
statement issued by the IAU that pertains to exoplanets is a working
definition issued in 2001 and modified in 2003. This definition contains
the following criteria:
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• Objects with true masses below the limiting mass for
thermonuclear fusion of deuterium (currently calculated to be 13
Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity) that orbit stars or
stellar remnants are “planets” (no matter how they formed). The
minimum mass/size required for an extra-solar object to be
considered a planet should be the same as that used in our Solar
System.
• Substellar objects with true masses above the limiting mass for
thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are “brown dwarfs,” no matter
how they formed or where they are located.
• Free-floating objects in young star clusters with masses below the
limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are not
“planets,” but are “sub-brown dwarfs” (or whatever name is most
appropriate).
The prose is a bit lawyer-like; however, basically a planet is a body that
cannot fuse deuterium and has less mass than about 13 Jupiters.
Now that we have a working definition of a planet, another question is:
do planets exist? We know of one example for sure – our own Solar
System. So it certainly is possible. We also know, in general, how planets
form:
• Stars form in collapsing molecular clouds. Disks of material appear
to be a natural result of the cloud collapse. We can see these disks
around young stars forming in our Galaxy.
• If these disks contain enough material (besides hydrogen and
helium gas) then planets can form as the disk cools and condenses.
Finally then, what does our Solar System tell us about planetary
systems in general?
• Planets orbit in the same plane as expected if they formed in a
rotating disk.
• Planets (except Mercury) have almost circular orbits.
• Small rocky planets form near the Sun (or central star); gas giants
far from the Sun. We explain this by temperature: near the Sun it
was too warm for water to condense; far from the Sun water ice
was stable, adding to the material available to form planets – and
gas molecules were moving more slowly allowing the growing
planets to trap large amounts of hydrogen and helium gas from the
disk.
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Since these characteristics are consistent with planet formation from a
circum-stellar disk, we would expect other planetary systems to be similar
to our own.
Early History of Planet Searches
Astrometry is the oldest search method for extra-solar planets.
Astrometry is the precise measurement of stellar positions and motions
and is the most fundamental aspect of astronomical work. The search
method dates back at least to statements made by William Herschel in the
late 18th century. He claimed that an unseen companion was affecting the
position of the star he cataloged as 70 Ophiuchi (star number 70 in the
constellation of Ophiuchus).
The first known formal astrometric calculation for an extrasolar planet
was made by Captain W. S. Jacob in 1855 at the East India Company’s
Madras Observatory. He reported that orbital anomalies made it “highly
probable” that there was a “planetary body” in the 70 Ophiuchi system.i In
the 1890s Thomas J. J. See of the University of Chicago and the United
States Naval Observatory stated that the orbital anomalies proved the
existence of a dark body in the 70 Ophiuchi system with a 36-year period
around one of the stars.ii However, Forest Ray Moulton (probably around
1915) proved that a three-body system with those orbital parameters
would be highly unstable. During the 1950s and 1960s, Peter van de Kamp
of Swarthmore College made another series of detection claims, this time
for planets orbiting Barnard’s Star.iii
Astronomers now generally regard all the early reports of detection as
erroneous. For two centuries claims had circulated of the discovery of
unseen companions in orbit around nearby star systems that all were
reportedly found using this method, culminating in the 1996
announcement of multiple planets orbiting the nearby star Lalande 21185
by astronomer George Gatewood. None of these claims survived scrutiny
by other astronomers, and the astrometric technique fell into disrepute. All
claims of a planetary companion of less than 0.1 solar mass made before
1996 using this method are likely spurious.
In 2002, astronomers did succeed in using astrometry to characterize a
previously discovered planet around the star Gliese 876 (star number 876
in the Gliese catalog of stars).
One potential advantage of the astrometric method is that it is most
sensitive to planets with large orbits. This makes it complementary to
other methods that are most sensitive to planets with small orbits.
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However, very long observation times are required — years, and possibly
decades, as planets far enough from their star to allow detection via
astrometry also take a long time to complete an orbit.
The first published, confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made in
1988 by the Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H. Walker, and
S. Yang.iv Although they were cautious about claiming a planetary
detection, their radial-velocity observations (see below for a description of
this technique) suggested that a planet orbited the star Gamma Cephei.
Partly because the observations were at the very limits of instrumental
capabilities at the time, widespread skepticism persisted in the
astronomical community for several years about this and other similar
observations. Another source of confusion was that some of the possible
planets might instead have been brown dwarfs, objects that are
intermediate in mass between planets and stars. The following year,
however, additional observations were published that supported the reality
of the planet orbiting Gamma Cephei, though subsequent work in 1992
raised serious doubts. Finally, in 2002, improved techniques allowed the
planet’s existence to be confirmed.
Another early detection was in 1992, with the discovery of two
confirmed terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. The
first confirmed detection of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star
was made in 1995, when a giant planet, 51 Pegasi b, was found in a four-
day orbit around the nearby G-type star 51 Pegasi. The frequency of planet
detections has increased since then.
Why Can’t We See Planets The Way We Can See Mars?
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent
star. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light
source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. As
viewed from a distant star, the Sun is 600,000,000 times as bright as
Jupiter, 2.5 billion times as bright as Saturn, and 25 billion times as bright
as Earth.
Planets are also distant. Because of the great distances to the stars, the
small angular separation between a star and its planet is difficult to
resolve.
For these reasons, a planet would be lost in the glare of its host star.
Only a very few exoplanets have been observed directly.
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Instead, astronomers generally had to resort to indirect methods to
detect extra-solar planets. At the present time, several different indirect
methods have yielded success.
Indirect Methods of Detection
There are four main indirect methods, the first two are the primary
ones: (1) Detecting Planets by Radial Velocity Searches; (2) Detecting
Planets via Transits, (3) Detecting Planets through Gravitational
Microlensing; (4) Detecting Planets through Timing.
Detecting Planets by Radial Velocity Searches
From Newton’s laws we know that the gravitational pull is mutual; a
planet pulls on its star just as the star pulls on the planet. Thus, the two
objects will orbit around their common center of mass; while the planet
executes one orbit around the star, the much more massive star executes a
small wobble as well. For example, Jupiter’s gravitational pull causes the
Sun to wobble at a speed of about 12 meters/sec. We can detect the motion
of the star pulled by an unseen planet via the Doppler shift of the star’s
spectral lines; i.e., the tiny variations in the radial velocity of the star with
respect to Earth.
Radial velocity is the velocity of an object in the direction of the line
of sight (i.e. its speed straight towards or away from an observer). In
astronomy, radial velocity most commonly refers to the spectroscopic
radial velocity. The spectroscopic radial velocity is the radial component
of the velocity along the line-of-sight between the emitter and the
observer, so the frequency of the light decreases for sources that are
receding (redshift) and increases for sources that are approaching
(blueshift) – the Doppler shift. Astrometric radial velocity is the radial
velocity as determined by astrometric observations (for example, a secular
change in the annual parallax).
The Doppler shift of a spectral line depends on the ratio of the object’s
velocity to the speed of light. One determines the velocity, v, by
measuring the wavelength shift (Δλ) from the central wavelength λ:
Δλ v
= .
λ c
Radial velocity can be used to estimate the masses of the binary
systems and some orbital elements, such as eccentricity and semi-major
axis. The same method is also used to detect planets around stars, in the
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way that the radial velocity variation determines the planet’s orbital
period, while the resulting size of the displacement allows the calculation
of the lower bound on a planet’s mass. Radial velocity methods alone may
only reveal a lower bound, since a large planet orbiting at a very high
angle to the line of sight will perturb its star radially as much as a smaller
planet with an orbital plane on the line of sight. It has been suggested that
planets with high eccentricities calculated by this method may be
mimicking two planet systems of circular or near-circular resonant orbit.
The graph in Figure 1 illustrates the sine curve created using Doppler
spectroscopy to observe the radial velocity of an imaginary star which is
being orbited by a planet in a circular orbit. Each dot is a measurement of
the position of the star’s spectral line (as shifted from its central position).
Observations of a real star will produce a similar graph, although
eccentricity in the orbit will distort the curve. When vstar is the velocity of
parent star, the observed Doppler velocity is K = vstar sin(i), where i is the
inclination of the planet’s orbit to the line perpendicular to the line-of-
sight.
Figure 1. The Doppler shift of an imaginary star
To observe such a small Doppler shift, a very special accurate
spectrograph is required, as well as a sophisticated computer analysis. An
Olympic sprinter runs the 100-meter dash in 10 seconds, or 10 m/sec. You
or I could run at 3 m/sec (briefly!). And that’s the sensitivity of these
specialized spectrometers.
A team led by astronomers Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler developed
such an instrument. In 1995, they put their instrument on the Keck 10-
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meter telescope and began systematic observations of several hundred
stars, expecting to accumulate years of data to detect planets on orbits like
Jupiter. Well, within a year, the first planet detection was announced – a
planet with a 4-day period. Soon, a number of Jupiter-mass planets on
very short orbits were discovered.
The velocity of the star around the center of mass is much smaller than
that of the planet, because the radius of its orbit around the center of mass
is so small. Velocity variations down to 1 m/s can be detected with
modern spectrometers, such as the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial
Velocity Planet Searcher) spectrometer at the 3.6 meter telescope in La
Silla Observatory, Chile, or the HIRES (High Resolution) spectrometer at
the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
The major problem with Doppler spectroscopy is that it can only
measure movement along the line-of-sight, and so depends on a
measurement (or estimate) of the inclination of the planet’s orbit to
determine the planet’s mass. If the orbital plane of the planet happens to
line up with the line-of-sight of the observer, then the measured variation
in the star’s radial velocity is the true value. However, if the orbital plane
is tilted away from the line-of-sight, then the true effect of the planet on
the motion of the star will be greater than the measured variation in the
star's radial velocity, which is only the component along the line-of-sight.
As a result, the planet’s true mass will be higher than expected. We do not
know the orientation of the orbit: how much it is tilted to our line of sight.
Since we can only measure the motion towards or away from us, we do
not necessarily measure the full velocity of the star.
To correct for this effect, and so determine the true mass of an extra-
solar planet, radial velocity measurements must be combined with
astrometric observations, which track the movement of the star across the
plane of the sky, perpendicular to the line-of-sight. Astrometric
measurements allow researchers to check whether objects that appear to be
high mass planets are more likely to be brown dwarfs.
The radial velocity method has certain selection effects: it is easier to
detect more massive objects and easier to detect objects on close-in orbits.
So, we don’t yet know whether smaller, Earth-like planets are common.
Also, the unknown tilt of the orbit plane means that the ‘planet’ mass is a
lower limit.
A further problem is that the gas envelope around certain types of stars
can expand and contract, so these stars are variable. This method is
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unsuitable for finding planets around these types of stars, as changes in the
stellar emission spectrum caused by the intrinsic variability of the star can
swamp the small effect caused by a planet.
The radial velocity method is best at detecting very massive objects
close to the parent star — so-called “hot Jupiters” – which have the
greatest gravitational effect on the parent star, and so cause the largest
changes in its radial velocity. Observation of many separate spectral lines
and many orbital periods allows the signal to noise ratio of observations to
increase, thus increasing the chance of observing smaller and more distant
planets; planets like the Earth remain undetectable with current
instruments.
This has been a very productive technique used by planet hunters. The
method is distance independent, but requires high signal-to-noise ratios to
achieve high precision, and so is generally only used for relatively nearby
stars out to about 160 light-years from Earth. It easily finds massive
planets that are close to stars, but detection of those orbiting at great
distances requires many years of observation. Planets with orbits highly
inclined to the line of sight from Earth produce smaller wobbles, and are
thus more difficult to detect. One of the main disadvantages of the radial-
velocity method is that it can only estimate a planet’s minimum mass. The
posterior distribution of the inclination angle depends on the true mass
distribution of the planets. The radial-velocity method can be used to
confirm findings made by using the transit method (see the section on
this). When both methods are used in combination, then the planet’s true
mass can be estimated.
Results of Radial Velocity Searches So Far
Two groups (Marcy et al. at Berkeley; Mayor et al. at Geneva) have
now been searching for planets with this technique for almost 15 years.
They use special spectrometers with very stable platforms and calibration
combined with the largest optical telescopes on Earth. The limiting
velocity sensitivity is now down to just 1.5 meters/sec!
At least 50 stars have been found to have multiple planets. Because the
detection of multiple periodicities in the radial velocity curve requires
many more data points, the number of multiple planet systems is likely to
increase as the research teams acquire more data.
The exoplanets detected by this technique (> 520 objects as of 3/2011)
have characteristics very different from our solar system:
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1. Large gas giants are found very close to the central star.
2. Most of the detected planets have large masses, comparable to the
mass of Jupiter; many are larger than Jupiter.
3. Many planets are on very elliptical orbits (about half of the
sample).
One method for detecting smaller planets is to observe stars less
massive than the Sun. Stars with mass 0.5 to 0.3 that of the Sun are quite
common. They are fainter – and not as hot – as the Sun, but could still
have a habitable zone 0.1 – 0.2 AU from the star.
In the past three years, 12 planets have been detected with masses of 2
to 15 times the mass of Earth, small enough that these may be rocky
planets. (Jupiter's mass is 318 × Earth’s mass). Two of them orbit within
the potential habitable zone around one of these fainter stars:
One recent example: 4 planets around the small red star GJ581v
Mass of planet Distance from Star
(Earth masses)
1.94 0.03 AU – least massive planet yet detected!
15.6 0.04 AU
5.0 0.07 AU inner edge of habitable zone?
7.7 0.25 AU habitable zone?
Could it be that these faint red stars have habitable planets? As of 2010
two more candidate exoplanets were discovered around GJ581.
Detecting Planets via Transits
When a planetary-sized object crosses in front of a star, we call it a
transit (since only a small percentage of the light is blocked, it’s not really
an eclipse). We see occasional transits of Venus or Mercury here in our
Solar System. So, another method of detecting a planet is to search for a
small decrease in the amount of light from a star when a planet crosses in
front of it. Of course, only a small fraction of the planetary systems will be
oriented so that a planet crosses in front of a star as seen from Earth.
From ground-based telescopes, quite a few transiting planets have
been detected. The decrease in the amount of light from the star during a
transit is about 0.5% − 2%, corresponding to a fairly large planet. See
Figure 2. From the percentage decrease and the duration of the brightness
decrease, we can determine the size of the planet:
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• The drop in brightness during the transit tells us the fractional area
of the star that is blocked by the transiting planet.
• If we know the true cross-section area of the star (from stellar
models, compared to the Sun), then we can determine the cross-
section area of the planet, and thus its diameter.
When combined with radial velocity measurements to determine the mass
of the planet, we can then calculate the density of the planet, a real
physical quantity that tells us something about the nature of the object (gas
giant versus rocky planet).
While the other methods provide information about a planet’s mass,
this photometric method can determine the radius of a planet. If a planet
crosses (transits) in front of its parent star’s disk, then the observed visual
brightness of the star drops a small amount. The amount the star dims
depends on the relative sizes of the star and the planet. For example, in the
case of HD 209458, the star dims 1.7%.
Figure 2. Example of the transit method. The bottom figure shows the dip in light as the
planet passes in front of the star.
The main advantage of the transit method is that the size of the planet
can be determined from the light curve. When combined with the radial
velocity method (which determines the planet's mass) one can determine
the density of the planet, and hence learn something about the planet's
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physical structure. The nine planets that have been studied by both
methods are by far the best-characterized of all known exoplanets.
The transit method also makes it possible to study the atmosphere of
the transiting planet. When the planet transits the star, light from the star
passes through the upper atmosphere of the planet. By studying the high-
resolution stellar spectrum carefully, one can detect elements present in
the planet’s atmosphere. A planetary atmosphere (and planet for that
matter) could also be detected by measuring the polarization of the
starlight as it passed through or is reflected off the planet's atmosphere.
This method has two major disadvantages. First, planetary transits are
only observable for planets whose orbits happen to be perfectly aligned
from the astronomers' vantage point. The probability of a planetary orbital
plane being directly on the line-of-sight to a star is the ratio of the
diameter of the star to the diameter of the orbit. About 10% of planets with
small orbits have such alignment, and the fraction decreases for planets
with larger orbits. For a planet orbiting a sun-sized star at 1 AU, the
probability of a random alignment producing a transit is 0.47%. However,
by scanning large areas of the sky containing thousands or even hundreds
of thousands of stars at once, transit surveys can in principle find extra-
solar planets at a rate that could potentially exceed that of the radial-
velocity method, although it would not answer the question of whether any
particular star is host to planets.
Second, the method suffers from a high rate of false detections. A
transit detection requires additional confirmation, typically from the
radial-velocity method.
The secondary eclipse (when the planet is blocked by its star) allows
direct measurement of the planet’s radiation. If the star’s photometric
intensity during the secondary eclipse is subtracted from its intensity
before or after, only the signal caused by the planet remains. It is then
possible to measure the planet’s temperature and even to detect possible
signs of cloud formations on it. In March 2005, two groups of scientists
carried out measurements using this technique with the Spitzer Space
Telescope. The two teams, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, led by David Charbonneau, and the Goddard Space Flight
Center, led by L. D. Deming, studied the planets TrES-1 and HD 209458b
respectively. The measurements revealed the planets’ temperatures: 1,060
K (790°C) for TrES-1 and about 1,130 K (860°C) for HD 209458b.
However some transiting planets orbit such that they do not enter
secondary eclipse relative to Earth.
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The CoRoT mission, developed primarily by the French Space
Agency, was the first space mission dedicated to observing transits. It has
been in orbit around Earth for over 4 years and can reliably detect
brightness changes of 0.1%. The 17th CoRoT exoplanet was announced in
2010.
Detecting Planets through Gravitational Microlensing
Gravitational microlensing occurs when the gravitational field of a star
acts like a lens, magnifying the light of a distant background star. This
effect occurs only when the two stars are almost exactly aligned. Lensing
events are brief, lasting for weeks or days, as the two stars and Earth are
all moving relative to each other. More than a thousand such events have
been observed over the past ten years. See Figure 3 for an illustration.
Figure 3. Illustration of the microlensing search for a planet
If the foreground lensing star has a planet, then that planet’s own
gravitational field can make a detectable contribution to the lensing effect.
Since that requires a highly improbable alignment, a very large number of
distant stars must be continuously monitored in order to detect planetary
microlensing contributions at a reasonable rate. This method is most
fruitful for planets between Earth and the center of the Galaxy, as the
Galactic center provides a large number of background stars.
In 1991, astronomers Shude Mao and Bohdan Paczyński of Princeton
University first proposed using gravitational microlensing to look for
exoplanets. Successes with the method date back to 2002, when a group of
Polish astronomers (Ansezej Udalski, Marcin Kubiak and Michał
Szymański from Warsaw, and Bohdan Paczyński) during project OGLE
(the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) developed a workable
technique. During one month they found several possible planets, though
limitations in the observations prevented clear confirmation. Since then,
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four confirmed extrasolar planets have been detected using microlensing.
As of 2006 this was the only method capable of detecting planets of
Earthlike mass around ordinary main-sequence stars.
A notable disadvantage of the method is that the lensing cannot be
repeated because the chance alignment never occurs again. Also, the
detected planets will tend to be several kiloparsecs away, so follow-up
observations with other methods are usually impossible. However, if
enough background stars can be observed with enough accuracy then the
method should eventually reveal how common Earthlike planets are in the
Galaxy.
On May 18, 2011 astronomers announced the discovery of a new class
of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the
light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds are probably outcasts
from developing planetary systems and, moreover, they could be twice as
numerous as the stars themselves. These are free-floating planets.
The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand microlensing
survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way during 2006 and 2007,
revealing evidence for up to 10 free-floating planets roughly the mass of
Jupiter. The isolated orbs, also known as orphan planets, are difficult to
spot, and had gone undetected until now. The planets are located at an
average approximate distance of 10,000 to 20,000 light years from Earth.
The survey, the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), is
named in part after a giant wingless, extinct bird family from New
Zealand called the moa. A 5.9-foot (1.8-meter) telescope at Mount John
University Observatory in New Zealand is used to regularly scan the
copious stars at the center of our Galaxy for gravitational microlensing
events.
This could be just the tip of the iceberg. The team estimates there are
about twice as many free-floating Jupiter-mass planets as stars. In
addition, these worlds are thought to be at least as common as planets that
orbit stars. This adds up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our
Milky Way alone. The team sampled a portion of the Galaxy, and based
on these data, can estimate overall numbers in the Galaxy.
The study, led by Takahiro Sumi from Osaka University in Japan,
appears in the May 19 (2011) issue of the journal Nature. The survey is
not sensitive to planets smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, but theories
suggest lower-mass planets like Earth should be ejected from their stars
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more often. As a result, they are thought to be more common than free-
floating Jupiters.
Detecting Planets through Timing
When a double star system is aligned such that – from the Earth’s
point of view – the stars pass in front of each other in their orbits, the
system is called an eclipsing binary star system. The time of minimum
light, when the star with the brighter surface area is at least partially
obscured by the disc of the other star, is called the primary eclipse, and
approximately half an orbit later, the secondary eclipse occurs when the
brighter surface area star obscures some portion of the other star. These
times of minimum light, or central eclipse, constitute a time stamp on the
system, much like the pulses from a pulsar (except that rather than a flash,
they are a dip in the brightness). If there is a planet in circum-binary orbit
around the binary stars, the stars will be offset around a binary-planet
center of mass. As the stars in the binary are displaced by the planet back
and forth, the times of the eclipse minima will vary; they will be too late,
on time, too early, on time, too late, etc. The periodicity of this offset may
be the most reliable way to detect extra-solar planets around close binary
systems.
Direct Imaging
As mentioned previously, planets are extremely faint light sources
compared to stars and what little light comes from them tends to be lost in
the glare from their parent star. So in general, it is very difficult to detect
them directly.
Ultimately, the goal is to image planets around other stars directly and
to wring all the information possible out of those photons (planet
temperature from infrared and atmospheric composition from infrared and
visible light spectra).
The first direct detection was a single pixel in an image using an
opaque disk within the camera (called a coronograph) to block the star’s
light and allow a long exposure image. This was planet Fomalhaut b,
around the bright star Fomalhautvi. The method used a series of selections:
• Observe a star that is larger, hotter, and more massive than the
Sun. Thus the planet forming disk of material was presumably
larger and more massive, and the habitable zone farther from the
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star. An orbiting planet may be farther from the star, making it
easier to detect.
• Observe at near-infrared wavelength where the brightness contrast
between star and planet is not quite so extreme.
• Select a young star, where a larger planet has not lost all of its
initial heating and will be brighter in the infrared.
They acquired images of Fomalhaut with space-based and ground-
based telescopes, using an opaque disk in the camera to block the light
from Fomalhaut. Images taken two years apart consistently show a faint
dot that has moved slightly, consistent with the orbital velocity expected at
that distance from Fomalhaut. The planet is about 119 AU from the star.
Since the luminosity of Fomalhaut is 16 times that of the Sun, the planet
would receive illumination from the star comparable to Neptune in our
solar system.
Some projects to equip ground based telescopes with planet-imaging-
capable instruments include: Gemini telescope (GPI), the Very Large
Telescope (SPHERE), and the Subaru telescope (HiCIAO).
In July 2004, a group of astronomers used the European Southern
Observatory’s Very Large Telescope array in Chile to produce an image
of 2M1207b, a companion to the brown dwarf 2M1207. In December
2005, the planetary status of the companion was confirmed. The planet is
believed to be several times more massive than Jupiter and to have an
orbital radius greater than 40 AU.
Up until the year 2010, telescopes could only directly image
exoplanets under exceptional circumstances. Specifically, it is easier to
obtain images when the planet is especially large (considerably larger than
Jupiter), widely separated from its parent star, and hot so that it emits
intense infrared radiation. However in 2010 a team from NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory demonstrated that a vortex coronagraph could
enable small scopes to directly image planets. They did this by imaging
the previously imaged HR 8799 planets using just a 1.5 m portion of the
Hale Telescope. See Figure 4. The planet masses are 10, 10, and 7 times of
Jupiter.
Images taken in 2003 and reanalyzed in 2008 revealed a planet
orbiting Beta Pictoris which in 2009 was observed to have moved to the
other side of the star. See Figure 5.
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Figure 4. Direct image of exoplanets around the star HR8799 using a vortex coronagraph
on a 1.5m portion of the Hale telescope.
Figure 5. ESO image of a planet near Beta Pictoris. The planet is the bright spot about 11
o’clock near the center of the image. The dotted circle (upper right) is the size of the orbit
of Saturn scaled to this star.
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In September 2008, an object was imaged at a separation of 330AU
from the star 1RXS J160929.1−210524, but it was not until 2010 that it
was confirmed to be a companion planet to the star and not just a chance
alignment. An additional system, GJ 758, was imaged in November 2009,
by a team using the HiCIAO instrument of the Subaru Telescope.
The Kepler Mission
The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets (i.e., those one half to
twice the size of the Earth), especially those in the habitable zone of their
stars where liquid water and possibly life might exist. As of September
2010, Gliese 581 g, fourth planet of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, is the
strongest possibly terrestrial exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone
surrounding its star, although the existence of Gliese 581 g has been
questioned by another team of astronomers, and it is now listed as
unconfirmed at The Extra-solar Planets Encyclopaedia.
Named for Johannes Kepler, the Kepler Mission was launched March
6, 2009 riding aboard a Delta II rocket. The Kepler spacecraft watches a
patch of space for indications of Earth-sized planets moving around stars
similar to the Sun. There are over 100,000 stars like the Sun in the area.
Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler
will look for a slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the stars
and Kepler – the transit method. The observatory’s place in space will
allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its multi-year
mission. It is a job only a computer could love.
Figure 6 shows the field of view of the Kepler instrument. It points
between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra at a dense field of stars.
Data from the Kepler mission have been used to estimate that there are at
least 50 billion planets in our own Galaxy.
Kepler is sensitive enough to detect planets even smaller than Earth.
By scanning a hundred thousand stars simultaneously, it will not only be
able to detect Earth-sized planets, it will be able to collect statistics on the
numbers of such planets around sun-like stars.
The goal is to find Earth-like planets by searching for transits that
cause a brightness decrease of just 1/10,000 with a periodicity of about 1
year – such detections will require all four years of data, in order to record
repeated transits with a constant period.
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Figure 6. Field of view of Kepler
As of February 2011, Kepler had identified 1,235 unconfirmed
planetary candidates associated with 997 host stars, based on the first four
months of data from the space-based telescope, including 54 that may be
in the habitable zone. Six candidates in this zone were thought to be
smaller than twice the size of Earth, though a more recent study found that
one of the candidates is likely much larger and hotter than first reported.
• 68 planets with radii < 1.25 Earth radii
• 288 planets with radii between 1.25 and 2 Earth radii
• 662 planets with radii between 2 and 6 Earth radii (Neptune-sized)
• 165 Jupiter-sized planets with radii between 6 and 15 Earth radii
o (Jupiter’s radius is 11 Earth radii)
• 19 objects larger than 2 Jupiter radii
About 75% of these planets are smaller than Neptune (4 Earth radii).
So far, 408 of the planets are in multiple-planet systems. And these results
are just from 4 months of data, so only short-period close-in orbiting
planets are included. These are called ‘candidate’ planets because follow-
up observations are not yet available.
The Kepler dataset is so massive that astronomers are studying other
things with the dataset. An international team of astroseismologists, led by
the University of Birmingham, has used data from the NASA Kepler
Mission to sample the ‘stellar music’ of 500 stars similar to the Sun,
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according to research published 8 April 2011 in the journal Science. The
team used the information from these natural resonances, which is coded
in pulses of starlight, to measure the properties of these stars and will now
be able to compare their findings with predictions based on models of the
Milky Way.
Figure 7. Artist’s conception of Kepler 11.
Figure 7 is an artist’s conception of the Kepler 11 solar system
compared to our own. It shows the Kepler-11 planetary system and our
solar system from a tilted perspective to demonstrate that the orbits of
each lie on similar planes. Kepler 11 has the fullest, most compact
planetary system yet discovered beyond our own. All six planets orbiting
Kepler 11 are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in
size to Uranus and Neptune. If placed in our solar system, the outermost
planet would orbit between Mercury and Venus, and the other five planets
would orbit between Mercury and our sun. The innermost planet, Kepler
11b, is ten times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun.
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Summing It Up
exoplanets.eu (May 2011)
Planetary candidates detected by radial velocity or astrometry
419 planetary systems
500 planets
50 multiple planet systems
Planetary candidates detected by transits
121 planetary systems
128 planets
10 multiple planet systems
1,235 candidates from Kepler, 16 confirmed
Planetary candidates detected by microlensing
11 planetary systems
12 planets
1 multiple planet systems
Planetary candidates detected by direct imaging
21 planetary systems
24 planets
1 multiple planet systems
Planetary candidates detected by timing
7 planetary systems
12 planets
4 multiple planet systems
After detecting hundreds of exoplanets in the 15 years up thru 2010, we
are on the exciting threshold of detecting thousands of exoplanets and
identifying Earthlike candidates. Perhaps someday soon we will know if
there is life out there.
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i
Jacob, W.S. (1855). “On Certain Anomalies presented by the Binary Star 70 Ophiuchi.”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 15, 228.
ii
See, T. J. J. (1896). “Researches on the Orbit of 70 Ophiuchi, and on a Periodic
Perturbation in the Motion of the System Arising from the Action of an Unseen
Body.” The Astronomical Journal, 16, 17.
iii
van de Kamp, P. (1969). “Alternate dynamical analysis of Barnard’s star.”
Astronomical Journal, 74, 757.
iv
Campbell, B.; Walker, G. A. H.; Yang, S. (15 August 1988). “A search for substellar
companions to solar-type stars.” Astrophysical Journal, 331, 902.
v
Mayor, M. et al. (2009). “The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XVIII:
An Earth-mass planet in the GJ 581 planetary system”. Astronomy and Astrophysics,
507, 487.
vi
Kalas, P. et al. (2009). “Fomalhaut b: Direct Detection of a ɛ Jupiter-mass Object
Orbiting Fomalhaut.” Bull. Amer. Astron. Soc., 41, 491.
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