Astronomy with SalsaJ

Unveil an extrasolar planet by observing the light intensity emitted by its mother star. An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System.

Until March 2012, astronomers have made detections of 762 exoplanets (see http://exoplanets.eu for a complete and detailed catalog).

The vast majority of them has been observed through radial velocity and transit observations but other indirect methods also exist : astrometry, microlensing and timing among them.

At present, direct imaging is still difficult, even if lots of progress is being made. Anyway, most of the discoveries are about giant planets, thought to resemble to giant Jupiters, orbiting near to their stars, where they are more easy to detect.

In this activity, we propose to unveil an extra-solar planet using the transit in front of its star. (You can find here an exercise on the detection of exoplanets by the radial velocity method.)