A Cosmic Barbecue: Researchers Spot 60 New ‘hot Jupiter’ Candidates

A cosmic barbecue: Researchers spot 60 new ‘hot Jupiter’ candidates

Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new “hot Jupiters"—highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars.

Hot Jupiters constitute a class of gas giant planets located so close to their parent stars that they take less than a week to complete an orbit. Second-year Ph.D. student Sarah Millholland and astronomy professor Greg Laughlin identified the planet candidates via a novel application of big data techniques. They used a supervised machine learning algorithm—a sophisticated program that can be trained to recognize patterns in data and make predictions—to detect the tiny amplitude variations in observed light that result as an orbiting planet reflects rays of light from its host star.

Millholland and Laughlin searched systematically for reflected light signals in the observations of more than 140,000 stars from four years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission. The Kepler spacecraft is best known for enabling the detection of thousands of exoplanets that transit their host stars. During a transit, a planet passes in front of a star and causes a periodic dip in the observed starlight.

Reflected light signals can be difficult to distinguish from stellar or instrumental variability, the researchers said, but a big data approach enabled them to pull out the faint signals. They generated thousands of synthetic datasets and trained an algorithm to recognize the properties of the reflected light signals in comparison to those with other types of variability.

The reflected light signals hold rich information about the planets’ atmospheres, according to the researchers. They contain characteristics such as cloud existence, atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and day-night temperature contrasts. Read more at: phys.org