This student discovered 17 exoplanets in the Kepler space telescope data

Her name is Michelle Kunimoto. She is student at the University of British Columbia (Canada). And by digging data from the Kepler mission ((Nasa) accessible to the public, it has just identified what could be 17 new exoplanets. The discovery has yet to be confirmed.

"Whenever a planet passes in front of its star, it blocks part of the light which comes to us from this star. So I was looking for signs of these decreases in brightness ", explains the student in physicalin one press release from the University of British Columbia . What the astronomerscall the method of planetary transit. And Michelle Kunimoto was able to flush out 17 probable planets. One would be only two-thirds the size of the Earth . She would be the most little planet never discovered using Kepler.

An exoplanet in a habitable zone

But another of these exoplanets draws all the attention. It was named KIC-7340288 b. A planet about 1.5 times the size of our Earth. So small enough to be a rocky planetlike ours. And which is also found in the star's habitable zone . A "Exciting discovery", according to Michelle Kunimoto because, for the time being, Kepler's data have revealed only 15 small planets in a habitable zone.

KIC-7340288 b is approximately 1,000 light yearsof our Solar system. It receives a third of the light we receive from Sun. And it revolves around its star in 142 and a half days, at a distance of 0.444 astronomical unit, or approximately 66.6 million km. It's just a little more than Mercury .

A high school student at NASA discovers an exoplanet with two suns

YOU 1338 b is not the first exoplanet known to be in orbitaround two stars nor the first discovered case of planetary transit around a star binary . But the satellite TessNasa has indeed equaled on these points its predecessor, the famous Kepler. However, the exoplanet is probably a gas planet , but it must, perhaps, have double sunsets like the famous Tatooine of Star Wars.

Article by Laurent Sacco published on 12/01/2023

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) is definitely Kepler's worthy successor in hunting exoplanets. Like him, NASA associated him with a project of citizen science: Planet Hunters TESS. It allows everyone to consult the light curves detected by Tess in an attempt to highlight a periodic and very characteristic drop in the brightness of the stars monitored during multiple planetary transits.

When an exoplanet repeatedly passes in front of its star host , it blocks part of the light. Tess, like Kepler, therefore observes a periodic trough and a given depth in the curve of the intensity of the light of the star monitored, which gives the period of the exoplanet's orbit but also indicates its cut. A similar phenomenon is obtained with two stars of different luminosity forming a binary systemand which eclipse each other for a terrestrial observer.

As a result, if multiple transits from different celestial bodies occur in a system, whether stars or planets, they will leave several time spaced hollows of different periods and sizes in a light curve.

YOU 1338 b, the exoplanet discovered by a high school student

This is how a high school student in the United States Scarsdale high school from New York, Wolf Cukier, discovered an exoplanet in orbit around two stars. He was responsible for a summer internship at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to take a closer look at the interesting candidates already identified by Internet users in Tess' public data. "I was looking in the data for anything the volunteers had reported as a binary to eclipses , a system where two stars rotate around each other, and disappear from our point of view at each orbit … About three days after the start of my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was not right. It was a planet ", explains the young student in the NASA press release.

Remember that YOU is an abbreviation for Tess Objects of Interest in English, which can be translated as "Tess's interesting object" and is used to name a star in Tess' catalog of observations. The exoplanet discovered by Internet users and Wolf Cukier is therefore called TOI 1338 b and its host star, which is in fact a double star, TOI 1338. The two stars which constitute it complete an orbit around one another in 15 days. This system is 1,300 light years from the Sun towards the constellation of the Painter. It is also in this constellation that we can make real films of movementsfrom another exoplanet around the star Beta Pictoris (β Pic) , as ABSMARTHEALTH astronomer Franck Marchis recently explained to ABSMARTHEALTH.

Tatooines galore in two years with Tess?

What is fascinating with the discovery of TOI 1338 b – although it is not the first of its kind for more than 10 years as ABSMARTHEALTH explained in the previous article below devoted to a similar find by Kepler– is that reality is getting closer to fiction once again. An observer on TOI 1338 b indeed sees probably seeing double sunsets every day as in the case of the heroes Star Wars on the famous planet Tatooine(unless the exoplanet is rotating synchronous ). However, TOI 1338 b is 6.9 times wider than Earth, which makes it comparable in size with Neptune and Saturnand suggests that it might be a gas giant .

The existence of TOI 1338 b has been confirmed in two ways. One of them was to use the second main method of detecting an exoplanet, that of gears radial, in particular from already archived data concerning ground observations. Celestial mechanics concluded that the orbit of TOI 1338 b is relatively stable for at least 10 million years, but the gravitational perturbations of the stars of TOI 1338 cause the orbital parameters of TOI 1338 b to change, so that one will no longer be able to observe planetary transits after November 2023. But they will return eight years later.

The astrophysicists also used a softwarecalled Eleanor, by name of Eleanor Arroway, the central character of Contact, the novel of Carl Sagan , to confirm that the transits were real and not the result of instrumental artifacts. Such transits in a system with a double star are indeed difficult to highlight in a way solidand above all, they are biased because we only tend to detect large planets because they block more light than small ones. Kepler has only highlighted a dozen systems comparable to TOI 1338 in the Milky Way .

With her heightened sensitivity and her research program on millions of stars in the Milky Way, Tess is expected to observe hundreds of thousands of eclipse binaries during her initial two-year mission. These double stars should probably also have circumbinary planets and the number of discoveries about them should increase significantly. We'll see…

Kepler discovered a "Tatooine" with two sunsets

Article by Laurent Sacco published on 09/16/2011

It is not the first known planet to be in orbit around two stars but the case of Kepler 16b is undoubtedly the most convincing and the most solid. Above all, it is the first planetary transit around a binary star. It's a gaseous planet, not a real Tatooine, but it reinforces the belief that it must exist in the Milky Way.

As the name suggests, the exoplanet Kepler 16bwas discovered by the instruments of Kepler. It is not the first time that we think of having observed an exoplanet around a binary star, there had already been at least one precedent with, for example, the system of γ Cephei . But the observations made here with the method of planetary transit seem really robust.

Initially, astronomers first saw only a series of periodic eclipses in the case of the star now called Kepler 16. It was therefore a binary system observed by the slice, as we known for a long time. Located about 200 light years from Solar system in the area of ​​the sky where the 150,000 are stars monitored by Kepler photometry, this double star turned out to be even more interesting when we looked more closely at its luminosity curve.

Astronomers have indeed found that there were additional small eclipses, even when the stars were not on the same line of sight, revealing the presence of a third body in orbit. It was indeed an exoplanet.

This discovery would certainly have pleased Carl Sagan since the team behind the article published in Science (given in link below) was directed by a member of the SetiInstitute, Laurance Doyle .

We are therefore in the presence of a planet where it is possible to observe double sunsets, inevitably making us think of the Tatooine of Star Wars. For some time now, indirect observations have suggested that such planets must be common in the Milky Way, but this is a direct observation, even if no image of the planet is yet available.

Not yet a real Tatoouine

We are not yet in the presence of a real Tatooine for the moment because the exoplanet discovered is half gaseous, with a masswhich looks like Saturn. But that proves that there should be one in the Galaxy , especially since we know that Arrakis are probably not uncommon in the Milky Way. Reality is therefore catching up with fiction, when will the discovery of monolith blackArthur Clarke ?

Kepler 16b does not seem to be habitable anyway, not even for possible moonsbecause it is outside the habitable zone . It orbits around a yellow dwarf type K, the most massive, itself coupled with a red dwarf five times less massive than our Sun.

" The NASA Kepler satellite made the first detection of a planet in orbit around two stars. About 200 light years from our Solar System, the planet Kepler 16b orbits two of the 150,000 stars the probe monitors between the constellations of the Swan and the Lyre. Kepler detected the planet directly by means of a planetary transit, an event where the brightness of a star decreases due to the passage of a planet in front of it. Planets orbiting double stars have been a favorite subject of science fiction writers for a long time, the most famous being that of the first Star Wars in 1977, which showed a double sunset seen from the fictional planet of Tatooine.

Until now, astronomers were not sure that such planetary systems could actually exist. With Kepler 16, they confirmed that the double sunset contemplated by Luke Skywalker is possible. The planet Kepler 16b is cold, gaseous, and about the size of Saturn. The stars are both smaller than the Sun and younger than our Solar system about 2 billion years. They orbit by eclipsing each other every 41 days from our point of view. The planet Kepler 16b orbits it around two stars, every 229 days.

It is outside the habitable zone of the stars, which is the region where temperatures allow theliquid waterto exist on the surface of the planet. Being made of gas , Kepler 16b probably cannot house life, but there are indications that rocky planets with double sunsets are common in our Galaxy. And the discovery of these clues by the Kepler mission helps to transform science fiction into a scientific reality. "