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Venus Transit Of Sun In June Will Find Alien Planets

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 19:11

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Observations of next month’s historic Venus transit may eventually help astronomers spot and study alien planets circling faraway stars, one prominent researcher says.

On June 5, Venus will cross the face of the sun from Earth’s perspective — the last time it will do so for 105 years. But the upcoming Venus transit of the sun is more than just a rare skywatching treat; it’s also a great opportunity to hone our techniques for hunting down and characterizing alien planets.

“We’re trying to do as much as we can to use the transit of Venus to understand exoplanets and their atmospheres,” Jay Pasachoff, of Williams College, told SPACE.com.Looking for transits is one of the most productive ways to find alien planets. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, for example, has detected roughly 2,300 exoplanet candidates using this method, which flags the telltale dips in a star’s brightness caused by a transiting planet.

The vast majority of these potential planets still need to be confirmed, but Kepler scientists estimate that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

One potential issue with the transit method is that brightness dips can be caused by a variety of factors other than light-blocking planets. For instance, dark patches known as starspots — akin to the sometimes massive sunspots seen on our own sun — can reduce a star’s luminosity slightly.

Next month’s Venus transit comes during an active period in the sun’s 11-year activity cycle, and it’s likely that some sunspots will darken the solar surface on June 5. So the transit could give astronomers practice in picking up a planet’s signal around a spotty, variable star, Pasachoff said.

The last Venus transit, in 2004, didn’t offer that opportunity, since it occurred during a quiescent phase in the solar cycle when the sun’s face was largely spot-free. (Venus transits occur in pairs eight years apart, but these dual events happen less than once per century.)

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Comments

Total 1 comment

terry the censor

Misleading headline for a genuine story.

http://www.space.com/15713-venus-transit-sun-alien-planets.html

May 18, 2012, 2:13 am 0 Reply

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