User:Artlessbarnacle/transitsandbox

Scientific Utility

Exoplanets found by different search methods each year through 2018, transit method in purple.

The transit of celestial objects is one of the few key phenomena used today for the study of exoplanetary systems. Today, transit photometry is the leading form of exoplanet discovery. As a planet transits its host star, it covers up some of the surface and thus lowers the incoming flux. This dip in incoming radiation is what signals the existence of an intervening body. Followup observations are often done to ensure it is a planet through other methods of detecting exoplanets.

Missions

Since transit photometry allows for finding many planetary systems at once with a simple procedure, it has been the most popular and successful form of finding exoplanets in the past few decades and includes many projects, some of which have already been retired, others in use today, and some in progress of being planned and created. The most successful projects include HATNet, KELT, Kepler, and WASP, and some new and developmental stage missions such as TESS, HATPI, and others which can be found among the List of Exoplanet Search Projects.

HATNet

HATNet Project is a set of northern telescopes in Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Arizona and Mauna Kea Observatories, HI, and southern telescopes around the globe, in Africa, Australia, and South America, under the HATSouth branch of the project. These are small aperture telescopes, just like KELT, and look at a wide field which allows them to scan a large area of the sky for possible transiting planets. I addition, their multitude and spread around the world allows for 24/7 observation of the sky so that more short-period transits can be caught.

A third sub-project, HATPI, is currently under construction and will survey most of the night sky seen from its location in Chile.

KELT

KELT is a terrestrial telescope mission designed to search for transiting systems of planets of magnitude 8<M<10. It began operation in October 2004 in Winer Observatory and has a southern companion telescope added in 2009. KELT North observes "26-degree wide strip of sky that is overhead from North America during the year", while KELT South observes single target areas of the size 26 by 26 degrees. Both telescopes dan detect and identify transit events as small as a 1% flux dip, which allows for detection of planetary systems similar to those in our solar system.

Kepler / K2

The Kepler satellite served the Kepler mission between March 7, 2009 and May 11, 2013, where it observed one part of the sky in search of transiting planets within a 115 square degrees of the sky around the Cygnus, Lyra, and Draco constellations. After that, the satellite continued operating until November 15, 2018, this time changing its field along the ecliptic to a new area roughly every 75 days due to reaction wheel failure.

WASP

Wide Angle Search for Planets telescopes have been around since 2004 and, so far, are credited with the most exoplanets found. The SuperWASP- North and SuperWASP- South conduct observations from La Palma, an island in Africa and Sutherland, South Africa, respectively.