NIST technology aids planetary discovery

Technology developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology has helped confirm that a signal originally detected by the Kepler spacecraft is actually a planet outside our solar system that could potentially support life.

Pennsylvania State University researchers validated the signal as an exoplanet (a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system) using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), an astronomical spectrograph recently installed on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. A unique feature of HPF is its precise spectral calibration with a laser frequency comb built by collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder.

Kepler detected the planet, currently known as G 9-40b, by observing a dip in the host star’s light as the planet crossed in front of—or transited—the star during its orbit, a trip completed every six Earth days. This signal was then validated using precision spectroscopic observations from the HPF by excluding other known factors that could have caused the signal. Observations from other telescopes, including the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory and the 3m Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory, helped to confirm the identification.

The planet, called G 9-40b, is about twice the size of the Earth, but likely closer in size to Neptune, and orbits its low mass host star only 100 light years from Earth – making it one of the closest transiting planets that have been identified so far.

The HPF is designed to detect and characterize planets in the habitable-zone—the region around the star where a planet could sustain liquid water on its surface—around nearby low-mass stars. It provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby low-mass stars. Delivered to the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in late 2017, the HPF started full science operations in late 2018.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Penn State, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship program, the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State, and the Research Corporation. The details of the findings appeared in the Astronomical Journal in February.

Read more: http://science.psu.edu/news/Mahadevan2-2020

Read the study abstract: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ab5f15