January 26, 2010 at 12:18Kepler telescope discovery: hot planets
This news passed by Habr, nevertheless it is very important in the industry.
The recently launched Kepler telescope, which was supposed to search for planets similar to Earth, instead found other planets - hot things that are unlike either the Earth or planets in general. Because they are hotter than the stars around which they revolve.
UPD: the answer
Kepler is designed to search for planets by the shadow cast by them on a telescope. More precisely, partial shade - after all, a distant small planet is not able to completely close a huge star. When a planet passes over the star’s disk, it partially covers its surface, and as a result we see a slight drop in the star’s brightness. If the planet passed through the disk, and then repeated several times - with the same depth of brightness drop and with the same orbital period - this gives confidence that the planet was discovered.
However, for the stars KOI-74 and KOI-81 there is an unexpected result. When a star closes a planet, more light disappears than when a planet closes a star - that is, the planet’s disk is brighter than a star.
It turns out that two obscure objects are circling around two hot stars. Their sizes - the order of the size of Jupiter, mass - two orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the largest planet in the solar system. Moreover, their temperature is higher than that of their hot, even by stellar standards, mother stars. And, judging by the light curve, they emit equally well both the daytime (facing the star) and nighttime sides.
What is it? The most honest answer to such a question - but it is unknown, there is no meaningful answer. Such an object obviously cannot be arranged like a planet - firstly, the mass is too large, and secondly, even if this mass was measured incorrectly, a planet with such a temperature would swell much more than one or two radii of Jupiter. The same considerations apply to brown dwarfs, which essentially differ little from very large planets.
Nor can they be ordinary stars, fueled by the usual nuclear reactions in the center, because stars of this size are dull red dwarfs with a temperature of 3-4 thousand Kelvin, and not 12-13 thousand degrees. It is unlikely that this is a thermonuclear power plant aliens - simply because it is unlikely.
The Universe has once again confirmed that it is much more interesting and unexpected than our ideas about it.
The recently launched Kepler telescope, which was supposed to search for planets similar to Earth, instead found other planets - hot things that are unlike either the Earth or planets in general. Because they are hotter than the stars around which they revolve.
UPD: the answer
Kepler is designed to search for planets by the shadow cast by them on a telescope. More precisely, partial shade - after all, a distant small planet is not able to completely close a huge star. When a planet passes over the star’s disk, it partially covers its surface, and as a result we see a slight drop in the star’s brightness. If the planet passed through the disk, and then repeated several times - with the same depth of brightness drop and with the same orbital period - this gives confidence that the planet was discovered.
However, for the stars KOI-74 and KOI-81 there is an unexpected result. When a star closes a planet, more light disappears than when a planet closes a star - that is, the planet’s disk is brighter than a star.
It turns out that two obscure objects are circling around two hot stars. Their sizes - the order of the size of Jupiter, mass - two orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the largest planet in the solar system. Moreover, their temperature is higher than that of their hot, even by stellar standards, mother stars. And, judging by the light curve, they emit equally well both the daytime (facing the star) and nighttime sides.
What is it? The most honest answer to such a question - but it is unknown, there is no meaningful answer. Such an object obviously cannot be arranged like a planet - firstly, the mass is too large, and secondly, even if this mass was measured incorrectly, a planet with such a temperature would swell much more than one or two radii of Jupiter. The same considerations apply to brown dwarfs, which essentially differ little from very large planets.
Nor can they be ordinary stars, fueled by the usual nuclear reactions in the center, because stars of this size are dull red dwarfs with a temperature of 3-4 thousand Kelvin, and not 12-13 thousand degrees. It is unlikely that this is a thermonuclear power plant aliens - simply because it is unlikely.
The Universe has once again confirmed that it is much more interesting and unexpected than our ideas about it.
Использованы материалы infox