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
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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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.
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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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.