introduction
THE Kepler space telescope is a space photometer developed by NASA to detect exoplanets and other small bodies orbiting stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It was launched on March 7, 2009 and placed into a heliocentric orbit (A heliocentric orbit is an orbit in which the Sun is the most massive body…).
Story
The main contractor for the construction of the telescope is Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. based in Boulder (Colorado). The mission is under the auspices of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), based in Pasadena in the United States, is a joint venture between…). It was named in honor of the astronomer (An astronomer is a scientist who specializes in the study of astronomy.) Johannes Kepler (Johannes Kepler (or Keppler), born on December 27, 1571 in Weil der Stadt in… ).
Observation techniques
For three years it will observe the luminosity of about 100,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus (Cygnus is a genus of birds in the family Anatidae. It is the genus of large swans…) and the Lyre. One of the possible causes of intensity fluctuations is the presence of planets in the bird nomenclature in French. Update) results in…) stars. Kepler is not in an orbit (in celestial mechanics, an orbit is the trajectory traced by a body in space…) around the Earth (Earth is the third planet in the solar system in order of distance…), but around them the Sun (The Sun (Sol in Latin, Helios or Ήλιος in Greek) is the star…) at point (graph) L2 of Lagrange. This also makes it possible to minimize gravitational disturbances and thus stabilize the observation platform. This also makes it possible to promote observation (observation is the activity of following phenomena carefully without wanting to…), with the telescope pointed in a direction in which it is not obstructed by either the Earth or the Sun becomes.
PlanetQuest, a distributed computing project using the BOINC Form platform, aims to enable analysis of the data collected.
Its precision should make it possible to detect terrestrial planets even in habitable zone orbits (In astronomy, a habitable zone (ZH) is a region of space where the conditions are…).
Description
It has a mass of 1,039 kilograms. Its energy (in the general sense, energy means everything that allows you to do work, produce…) is provided by a solar panel (a solar panel is a device for recovering solar radiation…) that delivers power ( The word power is used in several areas with a specific meaning 🙂 of 651 watts. It has a telescope one meter in diameter (for a circle or sphere, the diameter is a straight line section passing through the center…) to measure the light curves of stars.
Results
In August 2009, NASA announced that Kepler had transmitted images of the exoplanet…) HAT-P-7b.
On Monday, January 4, 2010, mission managers announced the discovery of their first five exoplanets, namely the planets from the stars Kepler-4 to Kepler-8.
| Star (A star is a celestial object that autonomously emits light, similar to a…) | Right ascension (In astronomy, right ascension (a or α) is a term associated with the coordinate system…) | declination | planet | beam | Discovery method |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSC 03549-02811 | 7:07:14 p.m | +49° 18′ 59″ | trES-2b (Kepler-1b) | 1,272 RJs | Astronomical Transit (A transit is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs when a celestial object…) |
| GSC 03547-01402 | 7:28:59 p.m | +47° 58′ 10″ | HAT-P-7b (Kepler-2b) | 1,363 RJs | astronomical transit |
| 16 Cygni B | 7:41:51 p.m | +50° 31′ 03″ | 16 Cygni Bb | ? | Radial velocities |
| GSC 03561-02092 | 7:50 p.m. 50 s | +48° 04′ 51″ | HAT-P-11b (Kepler-3b) | 0.422 RJ | astronomical transit |
| Kepler-4 | 19h 2m 27.7s | +50° 8′ 8.7″ | Kepler-4b | 0.357 RJ | astronomical transit |
| Kepler-5 | 19h 57m 37.7s | +44° 2′ 6.2″ | Kepler-5b | 1,431 RJs | astronomical transit |
| Kepler-6 | 19h 47m 20.9s | +48° 14′ 23.8″ | Kepler-6b | 1,323 RJs | astronomical transit |
| Kepler-7 | 19h 14m 19.6s | +41° 5′ 23.3″ | Kepler-7b | 1,478 RJ | astronomical transit |
| Kepler-8 | 18h 45m 9.1s | +42° 27′ 3.8″ | Kepler-8b | 1,419 RJ | astronomical transit |
In addition to the five exoplanets, Kepler discovered cosmic curiosities such as a star orbited by a small object whose temperature (Temperature is a physical quantity measured with a thermometer and…) is higher than its own (Siena (Siena in Italian) is an Italian city, capital of the province of the same name, in…).