Exploring the Vastness of Space: A Look at Exoplanets!

Hello everyone,

Today I wanted to talk about exoplanets because I love space and I recently made a post about how an AI found an exoplanet with a database that is already evaluated by astrophysicists and failed or overlooked the information that supported the presence of the exoplanet. I was really fascinated by the capability of AI, and the more I read about that information, I started to read about exoplanets and now here I am writing about the exoplanets. If you are wondering about what and how they find these small planets in this vast space, come with me, we'll see some interesting stuff in this post.

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Exoplanets are nothing but planets that are not included in the solar system. That is the exoplanets are planets like Earth, Jupiter, mercury, etc, but they do not revolve around the sun, they have their own star-like sun and their own planetary system. Exoplanets can be as small as a rocky planet like Earth to big and made of gases like Jupiter. there are a lot of organizations that are actively researching a lot of exoplanets for the presence of life and their capability to nurture any kind of life forms.

© iStock/Maximusnd

some of the organizations that are actively researching exoplanets and in search of new exoplanets are:

• NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration), obviously NASA is gonna be the first organization to occupy any kind of research related to space, here is the Link to their official website entirely dedicated to learning about exoplanets, NASA's Kepler and TESS missions have been very successful in discovering thousands of exoplanets.

• European Space Agency (ESA): The European space agency has several telescopes and they have upcoming missions such as PLATO and CHEOPS that are aimed at characterizing exoplanets.

• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS): Tess is a mission led by NASA which has been very successful and discovered hundreds of exoplanets and continues to discover new exoplanets.

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There is no direct way to find exoplanets since we don't know of their existence and we can't just look at space with the telescope and register every object we see as an exoplanet, an exoplanet has to be in a planetary system, it has to revolve around a star like how the earth or other planets in the solar system revolves around the sun. so scientists have to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to find them, I really want to talk about the methods scientists use to discover new exoplanets, but I don't have enough time to write about it now. but ill write about one common method scientist use to discover exoplanets.

One of the common and simple methods scientists use is called the transit method, the scientists observe a star over time for their brightness to dip. the idea behind this method is when an exoplanet passes in front of the star, the star's brightness gets dimmer, just like a solar eclipse. then scientists look for the depth and duration during the transit. by calculating this, we can get an estimate of the size of the planet.

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the recently discovered exoplanet is approximately the size of Earth, it was discovered by the Kepler telescope by NASA and is named K2-415b which is revolving around the red dwarf star K2-415. the distance between us and the exoplanet is 72 light years away which is kinda small distance considering the vastness of space.

we are already discovering lots of planetary systems, new stars, exoplanets, etc, By using machine learning we can boost that speed even more, I mean we already found an exoplanet by training an AI. so I think we are just getting started, the time when humans will mine and settle on other planets are not far. hope you learned something new today.

Thank you!