NORTH DAKOTA: NASA ND Space Grant astronomers reach for the hot Jupiter exoplanets
Novel approach to studying exoplanets enables UND team to spot sodium from more than 3.5 quadrillion miles away
Discovered in 2015, KELT-10 is a little younger, slightly hotter and 40 percent brighter than our sun. But KELT-10b, the only planet orbiting the star, is a gas giant like Jupiter that orbits its star ten times closer than Mercury’s path around the sun. A year lasts merely four days on KELT-10b.
At UND’s Department of Space Studies, observations of this “Hot Jupiter” planet are being used to better understand the formation and characteristics of exoplanets – planets and planetary systems beyond our own.
NASA ND Space Grant’s Sean McCloat, PhD student, and Dr. Sherry Fieber-Beyer, Assistant Professor, have made an amazing development using transit spectroscopy – how we tell what other objects in the universe are composed of, using light.
A key reason for studying exoplanets for McCloat and his faculty mentor, Fieber-Beyer, is the search for extraterrestrial life. By studying the elements found in exoplanet atmospheres, astronomers can look for signifiers of life – elements that correlate with what we know as bio-signatures.
KELT-10b, with its extremely close proximity to a star, is obviously out of the running for harboring life as we know it. But the peculiar planet is an excellent proving ground for refining the way scientists observe exoplanets more broadly, according to McCloat and Fieber-Beyer.