The use of instruments for purposes for which they were not originally intended is the strength of the astronomical community. Browsing data collected for one purpose and looking for hints for another seems to be a favorite pastime of many professional astronomers. This tradition is alive and well, with the team re-analyzing the first few data sets from Gaia, the ESA’s star cataloging researcher. They found hints of exoplanets, and the probe, launched in 2013, turned out to be a much better planet hunter than originally thought.
Gaia’s original mission was to follow the stars very closely. He originally aimed to create a catalog of more than 1 billion astronomical objects, including everything from quasars to asteroids. So far, it has far exceeded expectations, cataloging only 1.8 billion stars. This is done using three main tools. Astro is an astrometric instrument that measures the angular position of many of the stars it observes. Photometry is covered by the BP / RP instrument, which measures the brightness of its objects. Finally, the RVS instrument measures the speed at which objects think using the radial velocity technique.
Combining data from these three instruments allows Gaia to sense how far hundreds of millions of astronomical objects are and how fast they are moving. And he fulfilled his original promise spectacularly, with his data at the heart of dozens of articles ranging from observations of spherical cluster mergers to the darkest galaxy ever discovered.
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UT video discussing Gaia’s discoveries
But that’s not all; an international team of researchers involved in analyzing and releasing Gaia’s datasets thought they might be able to find other ghosts hidden in the star’s cataloger data. So far, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, many using the radial velocity method to watch a star move back and forth as the orbital planet’s gravity causes it to sway slightly in the sky. They believed that Gaia could do just that.
With Gaia’s super-precision instruments, he was well positioned to detect small changes in a star’s position when it was disturbed by a planet. In fact, the team uses photometric datasets from the ship’s three main instruments. They then submit this data to a training algorithm that uses the results of TESS’s exoplanet research to help the algorithm learn what to look for as a positive exoplanet find.
What they discovered were at least two new planets. Now known as Gaia-1 and Gaia-2, these two planets are “hot Jupiters” – giant planets that have an orbital period so fast that they are tidal locked with their star. However, although it first appeared in Gaia data, the existence of the planets was confirmed by observations from TESS, an observatory much more focused on exoplanet hunting.
Collaboration with UT Editor Fraser Kane and YouTuber Isaac Arthur.
TESS has a completely different basic monitoring strategy than Gaia. It focuses on multiple high-precision measurements of a star that can host a planet. In contrast, Gaia makes images of its target much less frequently as part of all its requirements for observing the sky. However, this did not stop researchers from trying. They were able to find that even with Gaia’s scarce data points, they were able to find not only the two confirmed new planets, but also 41 other exoplanet candidates that still need further validation before being officially accepted into the ranks. of famous exoplanets.
All in all, this is a great record for Gaia to look for things she’s not meant to be. But more is yet to come, with the next edition of Gaia Data, known as DR3, expected to be released in June this year. Undoubtedly, there is evidence of even more exoplanets just waiting to be found in new Gaia data with this newly trained algorithm.
Learn more: Panahi et al – Discovery of transiting exoplanets by GaiaUT – The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, hid a bunch of stars. Found by GaiaUT – Gaia from ESA just took a picture of L2 neighbor JWSTUT – Gaia has already given us 5 new insights into the Milky Way
Leading image: The artist’s concept of Gaia in space. Credit – ESA / D. Ducros
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