Page 109 - How It Works - Book Of Amazing Answers To Curious Questions, Volume 05-15

Space

A gas giant, or ‘hot Wide-Field Infrared
Jupiter’, makes a transit
Detection methods close to the surface of its Survey Telescope (WFIRST)
parent star Its primary science will be to
Building a top-notch observatory with current answer questions about dark
technology is half the battle: it’s not just a energy, but it will also search for
matter of pointing your telescope and hoping solar systems like our own.
to see something. This is because planets
don’t emit any light of their own, they can be
thousands of light years from us and they’re
usually found orbiting stars, which means
they’re lost in the bright starlight.
Astronomers have developed several
techniques to detect exoplanets indirectly, in
other words, by making observations that
infer the existence of a planet. By far the most
successful is the transit method, which
measures the miniscule decrease in the levels
of light from a star when an orbiting planet
passes in front of it. It has its limitations, of
course, but this method accounts for over

two thirds of confirmed exoplanet detections.

Advanced Technology
Large-Aperture Space
Telescope (ATLAST)
A potential successor to Hubble
and the JWST, the ATLAST
mission would search for
James Webb Space biosignatures (signs of life) on
Telescope (JWST) other worlds in our galaxy.
This hotly anticipated observatory
Transiting will launch in 2018 and sees in
Exoplanet Survey visible wavelength to infrared in
unprecedented resolution.
Satellite (TESS)
Due to launch in 2017, TESS
will survey the nearest
and brightest stars to us,
providing targets for
further observation.

Earth’s bigger and
older cousin

NASA’s Kepler mission has recently discovered a planet
that closely resembles Earth and orbits within a ‘habitable
zone’ – an area around a star where it’s warm enough for
water to be liquid. It may therefore offer just the right
conditions for supporting life. Named Kepler-452b, the
planet is 60 per cent larger in diameter than Earth and is
considered a super-Earth-size planet. Its mass and
composition have not yet been determined, but previous
research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b
have a good chance of being rocky. While it is larger than

Earth, its 385-day orbit is only five per cent longer because
the planet is five per cent farther from its parent star,

Kepler-452, than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is six
billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our Sun, Kepler-452b is the most recent
but has the same temperature, is 20 per cent brighter and planet discovered by NASA’s
Kepler mission that closely
has a diameter ten per cent larger. The Kepler-452 system resembles Earth
is 1,400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. © ESA; NASA

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