Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar extrasolar planets with telescopes?

Planets are considerably smaller than their parent stars, also they emit no light and are very close to the star. With all this combined, separating between the two with a telescope is very difficult.

1 Answer

Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

chandramohanPanakkal

Mar 25, 2016

A star is millions of times brighter than a planet..So it is lost in the glare.

Explanation:

stars are far away and it is difficult to see planets around them due to brightness.
For example 4 satellites of Jupiter is with in naked eye limit.But we can not see them due to brightness of Jupiter.

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Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

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Ground based telescope can not detect planet in the brightness of Star.

Explanation:

The central star is several million times bright than the planet..So to detect a planet from ground based telescope is very difficult.
Out of 3000 exoplantes now found 95% were found by Kepler space telescope which is specially designed to detect planet by transit method..Another method is to measure the wobbling of star when the planet comes near the star.

Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

Methods for detecting exoplanets

Because exoplanets exist outside our solar system, orbiting other stars, they can be hard to capture with a telescope. In fact, even Neptune, in our own solar system, is a blurry blue ball when viewed form Earth’s orbit. Because of this, it can be hard to find exoplanets.

The Transmit Method

Astronomers are able to find exoplanets because planets affect their stars in measurable ways. The two most widely used methods for detecting exoplanets are transits – the blinking method – or Doppler shifting – the wobble method. When a planet orbits its star, the planet will sometimes cross between it and Earth. This crossing is called a transit, and when it happens, the planet blocks a bit of the star’s light. It may be well under one percent of the light, but that’s enough for special telescopes to measure. If that star is blinking in a regular, cyclical pattern, that tells astronomers there’s a planet circling it – as well as the size (width) of the planet and how big its orbit is.

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Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

The Doppler Method

In the wobble method, astronomers rely on the fact that just as stars tug on their planets to keep them in orbit, planets also tug on their stars. So, as a planet circles, its star will wobble back and forth very slightly. This wobble is usually too small to see in an image, but it does show up as a wiggle in the spectrum, or color, of the star. Again, astronomers look for a pattern to that wiggle, which tells them how massive a planet is and how far away it orbits.

Why do astronomers find it difficult to locate extrasolar planets with telescopes?

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Why is it difficult to detect extrasolar planets?

It is extremely difficult to directly image exoplanets, as the light from the star overwhelms the planet – by more than a factor of a million. Even when the light of the star is blocked, most planets are too faint or too close to the star to be seen.

Why would it be harder for this telescope to find planets that are far from their host stars?

Finding planets orbiting distant starts is difficult because planets are much dimmer than the stars they orbit, and both the stars and planets are so far away.

Can an exoplanet be detected by an ordinary telescope?

It's pretty rare for astronomers to see an exoplanet through their telescopes the way you might see Saturn through a telescope from Earth. That's called direct imaging, and only a handful of exoplanets have been found this way (and these tend to be young gas giant planets orbiting very far from their stars).

How do astronomers detect extrasolar planets?

Exoplanets that can most reliably be seen by telescopes are large (like Jupiter) and very hot, so that they give off their own infrared radiation, which can be detected by telescopes and used to distinguish them from their stars.