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Exoplanets: How Do We Search For Them?

Exoplanets: How Do We Search For Them?

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How do we search for exoplanets?
With the global warming and sea pollution constantly growing trends, the future of Earth might be at serious risk. In addiction, the overpopulation of some regions might cause a global food crisis in nearly 30 years.
These are just a few reasons why some brilliant minds such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have started to plan a colonization of other planets like Mars, launching several rockets of their futuristic companies Spacex and Blue origin.
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What are exoplanets? How can we reveal their presence? Is it possible to find a place similar to our beautiful Earth? These and other great questions will be discussed in this video. Stick with me and I’ll tell you everything in a moment.

It’s surely interesting to wonder about a possible future destination for everyone, but in order to understand how this can be done we need to take a step back and try to look at our planet: Earth.
We all agree, except for some sceptics, that it has a spheric shape and that it has two main rotating motions: one around the sun, which causes the existence of four different seasons, and another around his axis, which is the source of day and night.
But why we use to call Earth as a planet? What is a planet?
The first revolution around the sun takes more time than the rotation around the axis, but this is not something that Earth shares with other “colleagues” of the solar system: for example, on Venus a year lasts less than a day. So what do all planets have in common?
They all complete a close motion around the Sun and they have a stable shape typical of a certain mathematical equilibrium called hydrostatic equilibrium. Practically speaking, this is the reason why all planets are spherical.
Addictionally, to gain the definition of planet a body must have a clean orbit without rocks or other astronomical detritus. As a matter of fact, in 2006 Pluto was declassified to the rank of dwarf planet because Eris was discovered, a big satellite that had nearly 27% of Pluto’s mass.
Finally, a planet must have less than thirteen times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest one in the solar system.
In parallel, an exoplanet is an astronomical object orbiting around a star different from the sun, but with the same features we already listed.
Is it easy to detect the presence of an exoplanet? Definitely not. They’re not simple to find and only a bit more than four thousand have been discovered after 1992, when the first two planets were seen orbiting around a pulsar. Even if this number seems really big, it’s totally incomparable with the amount of stars discovered, which is almost 500000 only in the milky way.
Stars are way easier to be discovered and catalogued as they shine on their own. On the contrary, planets happen just to radiate some tenuous infrared rays, that are surely not capable of reaching our detectors on earth. As a matter of fact, just less than 30 exoplanets have been detected by this technique called “direct imaging”.
Given the fact that it’s not possible to measure their emission, how can we “see” a planet? Through indirect methods. Physicists love to study little changes in the radiation of the major star that are capable of revealing the presence of one or more planets.
Let’s investigate the main techniques that are commonly used in astronomy for searching exoplanets.
The first one deals with radial velocity. A planet has certainly a consistent amount of mass that weakly attracts the star, which has some slight displacements due to its presence. More precisely, both the star and the exoplanet are orbiting around the center of mass, a virtual point on the line that connects the two bodies, which is located near the heaviest one. This movements of the star can be well detected through a very common technique: redshift. Have you ever heard anything about this?
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Teegarden B Has Highest Possibility Of Alien Life!

Teegarden B Has Highest Possibility Of Alien Life!

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From what the planets are like, to whether they could be places to find life, join me as we explore how Teegarden B Has Highest Possibility Of Alien Life!

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Watch Our Playlist: Exoplanets, Potentially Super Earths, New Earths!

Very recently (like found in 2019 recently), observers from CARMENES (who are a team looking for Class-M planets for us to habitate) found two Earth-like planets just 12.5 lightyears from planet Earth.Granted, that’s still pretty far and it’d still take us a long time to travel there, but 12 lightyears is much closer than the 45,000 light years and beyond of certain other “Earth-like planets” that have ben found. Not to mention, these two planets feel like ones that could have both the necessary water and land for us to live on:
“The two planets resemble the inner planets of our solar system,” lead author Mathias Zechmeister, a research scientist at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, said in a statement. “They are only slightly heavier than Earth and are located in the so-called habitable zone, where water can be present in liquid form.”
Research has obviously just begun on these two stars, but there is hope that they could be the real deal. For example, usually the fact that this is a red dwarf star (called Teegarden) would be a red-flag, as they don’t produce as much heat and light. But, the two planets are actually closer to the sun, so that actually would work in our favor.
The only truly “weird” thing about these planets is the orbits around their sun. It takes them between 1-2 weeks to do it, even less than that in fact. That’s massively quick. But, if you think about it, time is only a construct, so what would really matter is how those quick orbits help or hinder the landscape.
Even if these two twins aren’t perfectly suitable, the team at CARMENES are hopeful that other Earth-like planets could be as close as they are, and possibly in the same system as them.
But for now, let’s focus on Teegarden B, and talk about why certain people think that this is the planet that has the highest probability of being a place where alien life can be found.
Obviously, the biggest hurdle has been cleared in that the planet in is in the habitable zone of its star Teegarden. You’d be surprised by how many “potential Earths” are out there, but few of them are in a good range from their sun, which makes them either too hot or too cold, and when you’re trying to pick a planet to live on…you don’t go to a planet of extremes unless you’re in an EXTREME emergency, am I right?
Anyway, on the planet Teegarden B, you’ll find that the temperature is a suitable 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit on average. Which means it’s a semi-hot planet, but trust me when I say you’d rather have a “Summer Day” on another planet than a freezing one or one that is so hot your skin will melt.
Furthermore, as outlined earlier, there is a VERY good chance that Teegarden B has water. But not just water, oceans! A LOT of scientists feel that the oceans of Teegarden B are not unlike what we have here on Earth, and if that’s true that could be an even bigger sign that there is life on the planet. Not to mention, if there is land masses on there and not just a water world (which hasn’t been confirmed as of yet but is likely) that would mean that it could be a near copy of Earth with just different proportions of water and land.
But all of this would be moot if the star known as Teegarden wasn’t one to “cooperate” with the planet. What do I mean by that? Think about our own sun. Because of the distance to our star (93 million miles in total) we don’t get the brunt of the heat or the light or the radiation that it produces. We get just enough of it, and our atmosphere and magnetosphere deflects or absorbs all the other things that could potentially hurt us if we were to get it full blast.
There are many stars in the universe, and many of them have Earth-like planets surrounding them, including ones we truly believe could be the future home of humanity. The problem is that most times the stars do things like solar flares, massive bursts of energy and radiation that can destroy an atmosphere and cause untold damage to the surface of the planet that we’re trying to inhabit.
But in the case of Teegarden…despite it being a Red Dwarf star…it doesn’t act up at all. In fact, it’s been known to be a rather inactive and quiet star. Which is great, because given the distance of Teegarden to Teegarden B (which is much closer than the distance from the Earth to the sun), if flares were to happen, the planet would be ravaged by it. But since that’s not the case, it appears as though, Teegarden B really does have the best case scenario to produce life.

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Discovered Two Super Earth Exoplanets Orbiting A Star! (Gliese 887b And Gliese 887c)

Discovered Two Super Earth Exoplanets Orbiting A Star! (Gliese 887b And Gliese 887c)

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From what this new exoplanet is, to what it could mean for our understanding of the universe as a whole, and more! Join us as we reveal to you the discovered two super-Earth exoplanets orbiting a star! (Gliese 887b And Gliese 887c)
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Humanity has a goal to explore the stars, a goal that may find itself getting a boost in feasibility by the end of the decade. But we also know that to look outside our solar system is important because we can learn even more from the planets and stars that range across the solar system and see how it reflects what is near us. To that end, one of our greatest goals is to find and research as many exoplanets (a planet which orbits a star outside the solar system) as we can and see what they are like and what we can learn from them. Which is good, because we just found a major discovery which might just change things forever.
Because looking at the brightest red dwarf star in the sky may have presented the best chance astronomers have yet to analyze the atmospheres of alien worlds — and perhaps detect whether those worlds have life. This is according to a new study that was recently released.
Scientists focused on the red dwarf star GJ 887, also known as Gliese 887. (Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in the galaxy, and weigh between 7.5% and 50% the mass of the sun.) At a distance of about 10.7 light-years from Earth, Gliese 887 is the twelfth-closest star. Furthermore, at visible wavelengths, Gliese 887 is the brightest red dwarf in the sky, and with nearly half the sun’s mass, Gliese 887 is the heaviest red dwarf star within about 20 light-years of Earth. That may sound like a lot of needless stats but when it comes to stars you need to know as much about them to fully understand their power, potential, and lifespan.
Previous work found that many red dwarfs host planetary systems, ones usually made up of multiple small worlds. Still, “we’ve been looking for exoplanets orbiting Gliese 887 for nearly 20 years, and while we saw hints of a planetary signal, it wasn’t strong enough to convince ourselves that it was a planet,” study lead author Sandra Jeffers, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, told Space.com.
But that has now changed in a major way.
Pressing forward, the researchers examined Gliese 887 for 80 nights in 2018. They relied on the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument at La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining this data with archival measurements of the star spanning nearly two decades.
Astronomers use two strategies to discover most exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. One method relies on how distant worlds regularly block out a fraction of light from their stars as they pass in front of their stars from the observer’s perspective. However, this method will only spot planets that pass through the line of sight between Earth and their stars, meaning it will only detect a small fraction of exoplanets.
Instead, the scientists in this latest work looked for any wobbles from Gliese 887 due to gravitational tugs from orbiting planets. This was where their breakthrough came from. They found the red dwarf has at least two “super-Earth” exoplanets, dubbed Gliese 887 b and Gliese 887 c. The former is about 4.2 times Earth’s mass and orbits just 6.8% of an astronomical unit (AU) from its star (one astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun), whereas the latter is about 7.6 times Earth’s mass and orbits 12% of an AU from the red dwarf.
To be honest, finding even one exoplanet there after two decades of finding nothing would’ve been momentous in its own right, but finding two? That is something truly special. And yet, that wasn’t all.
The researchers also found evidence for a possible third planet farther out from Gliese 887. Although the red dwarf’s two confirmed planets are likely too hot for life as we know it on Earth, this potential third planet might lie within the star’s habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water. Which by our definitions is important to have life, which is one of the many reasons we search for exoplanets so we can see if there’s another planet of life out there.

#InsaneCuriosity #Exoplanets #Gliese887

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