New research may find planets like Earth.
By Dileep Thekkethil
Man’s quest to discover habitable planets other than Earth has new hope after some researchers’ speculation that they have found a new and accurate method to gauge the surface gravity of distant infant stars.
According to the researchers at the University of British Columbia, the new method will provide a more accurate picture of stars, which is pivotal in studying the planets that orbit them.
University of British Columbia’s Jaymie Matthews, co-author on the research published Friday in Science Advances, said in a statement, “If you don’t know the star, you don’t know the planet. The size of an exoplanet is measured relative to the size of its parent star.”
He also added that “Our technique can tell you how big and bright is the star, and if a planet around it is the right size and temperature to have water oceans, and maybe life.”
The force of surface gravity is calculated on the basis of how much one will weigh in another planet or star and this will differ from star to star.
The new method will allow astronomers to measure the gravitational pull of different stars with an accuracy of about 4% for stars that are in a distant galaxy or too faint to the technology that is currently used.
The newly found method, known as “autocorrection function timescale technique†or timescale technique, takes into account the changes in the intensity of the bright light produced by distant stars, which are observed and recorded by satellites like Canada’s MOST and NASA’s Kepler missions.
The frequent flickering of a star is one of the key element that astronomers use to understand many factors regarding the star and the planets nearby it. A close examination of a star from earth will determine the right size, distance of planets from a star and the possibility that any of them consists of liquid water.
Lead author Thomas Kallinger from University of Vienna said, “The timescale technique is a simple but powerful tool that can be applied to the data from these searches to help understand the nature of stars like our Sun and to help find other planets like our Earth.â€
New technologies such as the timescale technique will enable the scientists to closely watch the distant worlds and provide new insights into man’s search for life outside earth.