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The Kepler space telescope is a retired space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. After nine and a half years of operation, the telescope's reaction control system fuel was depleted, and NASA announced its retirement on October 30, 2018.
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. 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. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported as of April 2014 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.
79912 Terrell, provisional designation 1999 CC3, is a dark Adeonian asteroid from the central regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 10 February 1999, by astronomers Walter Cooney and Ethan Kandler at the Highland Road Park Observatory, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States. The asteroid was named after American astrophysicist Dirk Terrell.
A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars instead of one. The two stars orbit each other in a binary star system, while the planet typically orbits farther from the center of the system than either of the two stars, although planets in stable orbits around one of the two stars in a binary are known. Studies in 2013 showed that there is a strong hint that the planet and stars originate from a single disk.
Kepler-16 is an eclipsing binary star system in the constellation of Cygnus that was targeted by the Kepler spacecraft. Both stars are smaller than the Sun; the primary, Kepler-16A, is a K-type main-sequence star and the secondary, Kepler-16B, is an M-type red dwarf. They are separated by 0.22 AU, and complete an orbit around a common center of mass every 41 days.
Planet Hunters is a citizen science project to find exoplanets using human eyes. It does this by having users analyze data from the NASA Kepler space telescope and the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It was launched by a team led by Debra Fischer at Yale University, as part of the Zooniverse project.
Kepler-47 is a binary star system of constellation Cygnus with three exoplanets in orbit around the pair of stars located about 1055 parsecs away from Earth. The first two planets announced are designated Kepler-47b, and Kepler-47c. Kepler-47 is the first circumbinary multi-planet system discovered by the Kepler mission. The outermost of the planets is a gas giant orbiting within the habitable zone of the stars. Because most stars are binary, the discovery that multi-planet systems can form in such a system has impacted previous theories of planetary formation.
PH1b, or by its NASA designation Kepler-64b, is an extrasolar planet found in a circumbinary orbit in the quadruple star system Kepler-64. The planet was discovered by two amateur astronomers from the Planet Hunters project of amateur astronomers using data from the Kepler space telescope with assistance of a Yale University team of international astronomers. The discovery was announced on 15 October 2012. It is the first known transiting planet in a quadruple star system, first known circumbinary planet in a quadruple star system, and the first planet in a quadruple star system found. It was the first confirmed planet discovered by PlanetHunters.org. An independent and nearly simultaneous detection was also reported from a revision of Kepler space telescope data using a transit detection algorithm.
Kepler-89 is a star with four confirmed planets. Kepler-89 is a possible wide binary star.
Kepler-69 is a G-type main-sequence star similar to the Sun in the constellation Cygnus, located about 2,430 ly (750 pc) from Earth. On April 18, 2013 it was announced that the star has two planets. Although initial estimates indicated that the terrestrial planet Kepler-69c might be within the star's habitable zone, further analysis showed that the planet very likely is interior to the habitable zone and is far more analogous to Venus than to Earth and thus completely inhospitable.
Kepler-38 is a binary star system in the constellation Lyra. These stars, called Kepler-38A and Kepler-38B have masses of 95% and 25% solar masses respectively. The brighter star is spectral class G while the secondary has spectral class M. They are separated by 0.147 AU, and complete an eccentric orbit around a common center of mass every 18.8 days.
Kepler-25 is a star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It is slightly larger and more massive than the sun with a luminosity 21⁄2 times that of the sun. With an apparent visual magnitude of 10.6, this star is too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
David Robert Ciardi is an American astronomer. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy from Boston University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wyoming in 1997.
Kepler-453b is a transiting circumbinary exoplanet in the binary-star system Kepler-453. It orbits the binary system in the habitable zone every 240.5 days. The orbit of the planet is inclined relative to the binary orbit therefore precession of the orbit leads to it spending most of its time in a non-transiting configuration. By the time the TESS and PLATO spacecraft are available for follow up observations it will no longer be transiting.
Kepler-419 is an F-type main-sequence star located about 3,400 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. It is located within the field of vision of the Kepler spacecraft, the satellite that NASA's Kepler Mission used to detect planets that may be transiting their stars. In 2012, a potential planetary companion in a very eccentric orbit was detected around this star, but its planetary nature was not confirmed until 12 June 2014, when it was named Kepler-419b. A second planet was announced orbiting further out from the star in the same paper, named Kepler-419c.
References
- ↑ "SwRI Department of Space Studies Organization Chart". 1 July 2013. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ↑ "IAAA Fellows List". 1 July 2013. Archived from the original on 16 June 2013. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ↑ Schwamb, Megan E.; Orosz, Jerome A.; Carter, Joshua A.; Welsh, William F.; Fischer, Debra A.; Torres, Guillermo; et al. (May 2013). "Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System". The Astrophysical Journal. 768 (2): 21. arXiv: 1210.3612 . Bibcode:2013ApJ...768..127S. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/768/2/127.
- ↑ "Citizen astronomers lead to first-of-a-kind discovery: circumbinary planet in four-star system". 15 October 2012. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ↑ "The Road to Characterizing PH1: Transits and Initial Modeling". 25 October 2012. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ↑ Nesvorný, David; Kipping, David; Terrell, Dirk; Feroz, Farhan (July 2014). "Photo-dynamical Analysis of Three Kepler Objects of Interest with Significant Transit Timing Variations". The Astrophysical Journal. 790 (1): 11. arXiv: 1405.2060 . Bibcode:2014ApJ...790...31N. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/790/1/31.
- ↑ Schmadel, Lutz D. (2006). "(79912) Terrell [2.67, 0.16, 10.7]". Dictionary of Minor Planet Names – (79912) Terrell, Addendum to Fifth Edition: 2003–2005. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. p. 232. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-34361-5_2767. ISBN 978-3-540-34361-5.
