Conor Feehly is a New Zealand-based science writer. He has earned a master's in science communication from the University of Otago, Dunedin. His writing has appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Discover Magazine and ScienceAlert.
Illustration showing what exoplanet 55 Cancri e could look like, based on current understanding of the planet.Almost everyday, the number of confirmed exoplanet discoveries grows.
Super-Earths are more common and more habitable than Earth. Astronomers are finding more of the billions out there., waiting for dips, or fluctuations in the brightness of the stars. Such dips indicate to astronomers that something likely passed in between us and the star — and that something could be a new exoplanet.
Mistry explains that the transit method can only provide the radius of an orbiting body. What if a planet sized star, such as a brown oris in orbit? Astronomers would usually work out the mass of a transiting object using a method called radial velocity , which is where an orbiting body exerts a gravitational pull on its home star. This results in the star doing a little dance, or 'wobble'.
"The tool takes in the transit data and some inputs such as transit depth, period, TESS identifier, etc. Then based on that it starts fitting different models on the data and performs some probability calculations. And then finally it calculates False Positive Probability , if it turns out to be < 1% then we can validate that transit signal as a planetary transit," Mistry says.
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