Exoplanet Detection via the Transit Method
The transit method is amongst the most widely employed techniques utilized to detect and characterize exoplanets orbiting distant stars. By exploiting the subtle dimming of a host star’s brightness as an exoplanet passes in front of it, astronomers can obtain information about the exoplanet such as its size and orbital characteristics. The aim of this computational laboratory is to acquaint students with the basics of the transit method by making use of data from the Kepler Telescope to re-detect exoplanets that have already been discovered.
Lab Resources
Download the required data files from the link below. Be sure to extract them and save them somewhere on your Google Drive!
Once you open the Colab notebook link above, be sure to click File -> Save a copy in Drive before beginning your work! This will allow you to save your changes.
Further Readings
- Transit Photometry as an Exoplanet Discovery Method. In: Handbook of Exoplanets.
Hans J. Deeg and Roi Alonso, Springer International Publishing (2018), pp. 633–657. - Planet Hunters. All our episodes in order.
- Lightkurve Collaboration et al. Lightkurve: Kepler and TESS time series analysis in Python. Astrophysics, Source Code Library. (2018), 1812.013.
- California Institute of Technology. NASA Exoplanet Archive.