09 March, 2009

Attention Kepler Fans

Possible Worlds

Darksyde has the post I wanted to write but didn't have time for. Good thing, too - Darksyde does it better. Not gonna excerpt. Don't wanna interrupt the flow.
Posted by at
Labels:

3 comments:

Cujo359 said...

Watching 100,000 stars at a time for eclipses. The data requirements alone must be tremendous.

March 9, 2009 at 3:22 AM
Efrique said...

Hi Cujo,

While the article at Daily Kos refers to eclipses, what the instrument is really looking for transits.

If they were actually eclipses, they'd be (i) relatively easy to spot and (ii) (give the relative distances involoved) require extremely large planets - so large in fact that we'd be talking about a binary system, not an exoplanet orbiting a star.

You're right about the amount of data involved.

March 9, 2009 at 6:43 PM
Cujo359 said...

I didn't remember what the term was, if I ever knew, but didn't think that they could really be talking about eclipses. Thanks for clearing that up.

March 9, 2009 at 10:59 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)