Researchers Spot 60 New 'Hot Jupiter' Candidates with New Technique

The Yale technique pioneers a new discovery method that identifies more planets from the publicly available Kepler data, said the researchers. “I’ve been told by members of the Kepler science team that a search for reflected star-shine was part of the early renditions of the Kepler pipeline,” Millholland said. “They called it the Reflected Light Search, or RLS module. In this sense, we’re simply addressing one of the original intentions for the Kepler data.”

The reflected light signals hold rich information about the planets’ atmospheres, according to the researchers. They contain characteristics such as cloud existence, atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and day-night temperature contrasts.

The researchers also note that the 60 planet candidates will require follow-up observations for confirmation. This will come in the form of Doppler velocity measurements.

The Doppler velocity method is a well-established technique that enables the detection of wobbling motion in a star due to the gravitational influence of an orbiting planet. Since hot Jupiters are so massive and close to their stars, the stellar wobbles they induce are large and readily detectable.

A new, Yale-designed instrument known as EXPRES, which is being installed on the Discovery Channel Telescope in Arizona, may attempt to make confirmations later this year.

The research relied upon Yale’s High Performance Computing resources, in addition to computing clusters in the Yale Department of Astronomy. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program also supported the research.

Contacts and sources:

Jim Shelton

Yale University

The accepted version of the study may be found at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06602