Exoplanet Measurement


The Extrasolar Planets Research GroupThe Exoplanet Measurement Research Group. Back: Sarah Nymeyer (now in grad school at UCLA), Christopher Campo, Jasmina Blecic, Joseph Harrington, Kevin Stevenson, Nate Lust.  Front: Ryan Hardy, Christopher Britt (now working in biotech), Carthik Sharma, Patricio Cubillos, William Bowman (now in the US Navy).  Not shown: Oliver Bowman, Matt Hardin.

Joe Harrington and his team of graduate and undergraduate students use data from the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure exoplanets, which are planets outside of our own solar system.  So far, most of the known exoplanets that we can measure by their own emitted or reflected light (our group's specialty) are roughly the size of Jupiter.  Many of these orbit their parent stars in just a few days.  As such, they are labeled "hot Jupiters."  NASA's Kepler spacecraft has found thousands of planet candidates, many of them about Earth-sized and a few in their stars' "habitable zones," where water could potentially exist as a liquid on the planet's surface.  Most of these are "candidates" because they lack confirmation by other means, but some have since been confirmed.  We are excited by the prospect of someday measuring Earth-like planets by their own light!  These are the measurements that will tell us whether conditions there are hospitable to life, and even whether life exists on worlds outside our solar system.

 

Courtesy Sara Seager (MIT) & Alexis Smith (Keele University)

Exoplanetary Eclipses and Transits

The close-in planets are hard to study because they cannot (yet) be distinguished as separate objects from their parent stars in images.  Instead, light from both the star and the planet appears as a single point.  However, we can use a trick to measure the light of some planets directly.  These planets orbit right in front of their parent stars as seen from Earth.  This event, known as a primary transit, causes a small drop in a system's total light as the planet blocks part of the star's surface.  By measuring the drop in light, we can determine the planet's size, and combining transit measurements with other observations yields the planet's mass and orbital parameters!

These transiting planets generally also pass behind their stars, an event called a secondary eclipse.  Measuring eclipses in the infrared, where these hot planets emit a lot of light, yields information on the planet's temperature.  We can even assess the atmospheric composition by measuring eclipses at different infrared wavelengths and applying models that consider the known behavior of atmospheric gases such as H20, CH4, CO, and CO2.  This works because molecules in a planet's atmosphere absorb and emit light at specific, well-known wavelengths.

Spitzer Target-of-Opportunity Program

The Spitzer Space Telescope

Our group leads a program on the Spitzer Space Telescope that observes eclipses and transits of newly-discovered exoplanets.  Participating discoverers include the Wide-Angle Search for Planets (WASP), Hungarian-made Automated Telescopes (HAT), XO, Geneva, and Yale/SFSU teams.  As new planets are announced, we assess their observability and, where warranted, submit new observing requests to the Spitzer Space Telescope throughout the year.  Our published results include digital versions of our derived transit and eclipse lightcurves.

The Spitzer Space Telescope trails behind the Earth in its orbit around the sun.  Spitzer uses an 85-cm (33.5-inch) diameter primary mirror and various instruments (IRAC, IRS, and MIPS) to observe in the infrared (3 - 180 μm).  After more than 6 years of operation, the satellite has run out of coolant, thus limiting its capabilities to the IRAC 3.6- and 4.5-μm bands.

Links to Scientific Results and Media Coverage

WASP-12b - The First Carbon-Rich Exoplanet (2011 Nature article)
  1.   Further details
  2.   Article in Nature
  3.   UCF press release
  4.   MIT news release
  5.   Spitzer press release
  6.   Story from Space.com
GJ 436b - Where's the Methane? (2010 Nature article)
  1.   Further details
  2.   Article in Nature
  3.   UCF press release
  4.   MIT news release
  5.   Spitzer press release
  6.   Story from Space.com
HD 149026b - The Hottest Planet (2007 Nature article)
  1.   Article in Nature
  2.   UCF News report on the Hottest Planet
upsilon Andromedae b - Day and Night on an Exoplanet (2006 Science article)
  1. Cover article in Science
  2. Spitzer press release

 

Contact

Research Focus: Planetary Science / Astronomy

Office: PS 441

Email: jh@physics.ucf.edu

Phone: 407-823-3416 

Website: http://planets.ucf.edu/people/Joseph_Harrington