![]() Įlizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. While such work may focus largely on gas giants, scientists say Webb's observations will be useful for a future generation of observatories with even more high-powered optics ready to see planets closer in size to Earth.įollow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Webb will help enhance the tally of exoplanets by studying the atmospheres of several relatively nearby worlds in detail. Several other huge telescopes under construction on the ground, including the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, are scheduled to come online later this decade, adding other powerful eyes to the ongoing search. In space, numerous observatories also assist with the planet search, among them NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS), the NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope, and ESA's Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite ( CHEOPS). While access has been restricted periodically in latter years due to the coronavirus pandemic, HARPS remains operational and continues to seek new worlds with high precision. On the ground, the HARPS spectrograph, which is part of the 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, is an adept planet-hunter of its own.īy 2011 (eight years after first light), HARPS had discovered more than 150 exoplanets. ![]() Many other instruments have joined the planet hunt since Kepler launched. 10 exoplanets that could host alien life Alien landscapes: 15 places on Earth that look exoplanetary These 10 super extreme exoplanets are out of this world Kepler has racked up more than 2,700 planet discoveries to date, many of them Earth-sized or smaller worlds, and still has a database generating fresh finds to this day. That would assess the light of a star and look for tiny fluctuations as a planet passed across the face.Īstronomer William Borucki helped realize that vision as the principal investigator of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009 and exceeded its main mission by several years until it finally ran out of fuel in 2018. To find more Earth-sized planets, astronomers said at the time, they would need to try something called the "transit" method. Larger worlds were easier to spot, as they induced bigger wobbles. That world was not hospitable to life as we know it it was a scorching-hot gas giant that whipped around its parent star in only four Earth days.Īstronomers found these worlds by spotting wobbles (back and forth gravitationally induced motions) of stars as planets tugged upon them. Ground-based telescopes did the heavy lifting in those early years, and it took several more searches to finally uncover the first planet around a sun-like star in 1995. They spotted two worlds orbiting a pulsar (a rapidly rotating, dense star corpse) by measuring subtle changes in the timing of the pulses as the light reached Earth. The first confirmed planetary discovery came in 1992, when astronomers Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper in the journal Nature. ![]()
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