Members were given access to Kepler’s data (which are now public) in hopes that they might spot something of interest that a computer might miss. Jacobs, who works as an employment consultant for people with intellectual disabilities by day, is a member of the Planet Hunters - a citizen scientist project first established by Yale University to enlist amateur astronomers in the search for exoplanets. However, on March 18, Jacobs, an amateur astronomer who has made it his hobby to comb through Kepler’s data, was able to pick out several curious light patterns amid the noise. Comets, in comparison, span just several football fields, or a small city at their largest, making them incredibly difficult to spot. The smallest exoplanets detected thus far measure about one-third the size of the Earth. To date, the mission has identified and confirmed more than 2,400 exoplanets, mostly orbiting anonymous stars in the constellation Cygnus, with the help of automated algorithms that quickly sift through Kepler’s data, looking for characteristic dips in starlight. For four years, the spacecraft monitored about 200,000 stars for dips in starlight caused by transiting exoplanets. The detection was made using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a stellar observatory that was launched into space in 2009. Other authors include Vanderburg, Adam Kraus, and Aaron Rizzuto of The University of Texas at Austin astronomers from NASA Ames Research Center and Northeastern University and amateur astronomers including Thomas Jacobs of Bellevue, Washington. The team have published their results this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “It’s pretty impressive to be able to see something so small, so far away.” “It’s amazing that something several orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth can be detected just by the fact that it’s emitting a lot of debris,” says Saul Rappaport, professor emeritus of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. The researchers were able to pick out the comet’s tail, or trail of gas and dust, which blocked about one-tenth of 1 percent of the star’s light as the comet streaked by. These are some of the first glimpses at the population of comets outside our own solar system.” “No one has ever seen anything quite like these transits before. “It’s just thrilling to find these comets,” Vanderburg says.
Such dips signal potential transits, or crossings of planets or other objects in front of a star, which momentarily block a small fraction of its light. The discovery by Andrew Vanderburg, NASA Sagan Fellow at UT Austin, and the team marks the first time that an object as small as a comet has been inferred using transit photometry, a technique by which astronomers observe a star’s light for telltale dips in intensity.
These cosmic balls of ice and dust, which were about the size of Halley’s comet and traveled about 100,000 miles per hour before they ultimately vaporized, are some of the smallest objects yet found outside our own solar system. AUSTIN - Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin, working with scientists from other institutions and amateur astronomers, have spotted the dusty tails of six exocomets - comets outside our solar system - orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth.
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