In astronomy, a light curve is a graph of the light intensity of a celestial object or region as a function of time, typically with the magnitude of light received on the y-axis and with time on the x-axis. The light is usually in a particular frequency interval or band.
CoRoT was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly those of large terrestrial size, and to perform asteroseismology by measuring solar-like oscillations in stars. The mission was led by the French Space Agency (CNES) in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) and other international partners.
In astronomy, a transit is the passage of a celestial body directly between a larger body and the observer. As viewed from a particular vantage point, the transiting body appears to move across the face of the larger body, covering a small portion of it.
The Kepler space telescope is a defunct space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-sized 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.
An exomoon or extrasolar moon is a natural satellite that orbits an exoplanet or other non-stellar extrasolar body.
TrES-2b is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star GSC 03549-02811 located 750 light years away from the Solar System. The planet was identified in 2011 as the darkest known exoplanet, reflecting less than 1% of any light that hits it. Reflecting less light than charcoal, on the surface the planet is said to be pitch black. The planet's mass and radius indicate that it is a gas giant with a bulk composition similar to that of Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, but similar to many planets detected around other stars, TrES-2b is located very close to its star and belongs to the class of planets known as hot Jupiters. This system was within the field of view of the Kepler spacecraft.
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 January 2024 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.
GSC 03549-02811 is a binary star containing a yellow main-sequence star similar to the Sun. This star is located approximately 750 light-years away in the constellation of Draco. The apparent magnitude of this star is 11.41, which means it is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with a medium-sized amateur telescope on a clear dark night. The age of this star is about 5 billion years.
Kepler-7 is a star located in the constellation Lyra in the field of view of the Kepler Mission, a NASA operation in search of Earth-like planets. It is home to the fourth of the first five planets that Kepler discovered; this planet, a Jupiter-size gas giant named Kepler-7b, is as light as styrofoam. The star itself is more massive than the Sun, and is nearly twice the Sun's radius. It is also slightly metal-rich, a major factor in the formation of planetary systems. Kepler-7's planet was presented on January 4, 2010 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
A Kepler object of interest (KOI) is a star observed by the Kepler space telescope that is suspected of hosting one or more transiting planets. KOIs come from a master list of 150,000 stars, which itself is generated from the Kepler Input Catalog (KIC). A KOI shows a periodic dimming, indicative of an unseen planet passing between the star and Earth, eclipsing part of the star. However, such an observed dimming is not a guarantee of a transiting planet, because other astronomical objects—such as an eclipsing binary in the background—can mimic a transit signal. For this reason, the majority of KOIs are as yet not confirmed transiting planet systems.
Kepler-40b, formerly known as KOI-428b, is a hot Jupiter discovered in orbit around the star Kepler-40, which is about to become a red giant. The planet was first noted as a transit event by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. The Kepler team made data collected by its satellite publicly available, including data on Kepler-40; French and Swiss astronomers used the equivalent to one night of measurements on the SOPHIE échelle spectrograph to collect all the data needed to show that a planet was producing the periodic dimming of Kepler-40. The planet, Kepler-40b, is twice the mass of Jupiter and slightly larger than it in size, making it as dense as Neptune. The planet is also nearly thirteen times hotter than Jupiter and orbits five times closer to its star than Mercury is from the Sun.
HAT-P-32b is a planet orbiting the G-type or F-type star HAT-P-32, which is approximately 950 light years away from Earth. HAT-P-32b was first recognized as a possible planet by the planet-searching HATNet Project in 2004, although difficulties in measuring its radial velocity prevented astronomers from verifying the planet until after three years of observation. The Blendanal program helped to rule out most of the alternatives that could explain what HAT-P-32b was, leading astronomers to determine that HAT-P-32b was most likely a planet. The discovery of HAT-P-32b and of HAT-P-33b was submitted to a journal on 6 June 2011.
HAT-P-33b is a planet in the orbit of HAT-P-33, which lies 1,310 light years away from Earth. Its discovery was reported in June 2011, although it was suspected to be a planet as early as 2004. The planet is about three-fourths the mass of Jupiter, but is almost eighty percent larger than Jupiter is; this inflation has, as with the discovery of similar planets WASP-17b and HAT-P-32b, raised the question of what causes these planets to become so large.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is an online astronomical exoplanet catalog and data service that collects and serves public data that support the search for and characterization of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) and their host stars. It is part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center and is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. The archive is funded by NASA and was launched in early December 2011 by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute as part of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. In June 2019, the archive's collection of confirmed exoplanets surpassed 4,000.
Kepler-69c is a confirmed super-Earth exoplanet, likely rocky, orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-69, the outermore of two such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. It is located about 2,430 light-years from Earth.
PH2, also known as Kepler-86, or KIC 12735740, is a G-type star 1,120 light-years distant within the constellation Cygnus. Roughly the size and temperature of the Sun, PH2 gained prominence when it was known to be the host of one of 42 planet candidates detected by the Planet Hunters citizen science project in its second data release. The candidate orbiting around PH2, known as PH2b, had been determined to have a spurious detection probability of only 0.08%, thus effectively confirming its existence as a planet.
Kepler-186 is a main-sequence M1-type dwarf star, located 177.5 parsecs away in the constellation of Cygnus. The star is slightly cooler than the sun, with roughly half its metallicity. It is known to have five planets, including the first Earth-sized world discovered in the habitable zone: Kepler-186f. The star hosts four other planets discovered so far, though they all orbit interior to the habitable zone.
Kepler-444 is a triple star system, estimated to be 11.2 billion years old, approximately 119 light-years (36 pc) away from Earth in the constellation Lyra. On 27 January 2015, the Kepler spacecraft is reported to have confirmed the detection of five sub-Earth-sized rocky exoplanets orbiting the main star. The star is a K-type main sequence star. All of the planets are far too close to their star to harbour life forms.
Kepler-13 or KOI-13 is a stellar triple star system consisting of Kepler-13A, around which an orbiting hot Jupiter exoplanet was discovered with the Kepler space telescope in 2011, and Kepler-13B a common proper motion companion star which has an additional star orbiting it.
TOI-700 is a red dwarf 101.4 light-years away from Earth located in the Dorado constellation that hosts TOI-700 d, the first Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
