The University of New Mexico announced Tuesday that its Department of Physics and Astronomy secured a $750,000 grant from NASA to support its research on exoplanets.
Diana Dragomir, UNM assistant professor, defines exoplanets as, "any planet outside the solar system that orbits another star, other than the sun; that's what we call an exoplanet."
The department, with the assistance of NASA, will utilize the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) telescope and employs the transit method, observing numerous stars to identify exoplanets.
Described as slightly larger than a fridge, the TESS telescope follows an elliptical orbit, covering a distance equivalent to that between Earth and the Moon, and is equipped with four cameras capturing rectangular images across the celestial equator to the pole, according to a press release by UNM.
"In cases where that plane aligns with our line of sight and a planet passes between the star and our telescope, we may observe a transit—a temporary dimming of the star's brightness caused by the planet crossing in front of it from our viewpoint," Dragomir said.
As part of the NASA grant, the department will collaborate with Dr. Andrew Mann from the University of North Carolina. Additionally, they will welcome Zahra Essack, a Postdoc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who will join the team to contribute to the advancement of their research, according to a press release by UNM.
"What happens if the planet has a period longer than 27 days and it transits? Well, we might see just one transit, and we will have to use other methods to determine its orbital period," Dragomir said. "But these 'longer-period' transiting exoplanets are important to find and study because they may be more similar to the Solar System planets.”
"Now that I know there's a potential planet, I plan to explore other observational methods to verify its existence and measure its period," she said in the press release. "It's a rare occurrence to capture a transit that happens only once every ten years. When TESS is observing, it's already considered incredibly fortunate, but the alignment needs to be even more precise for a transit to occur from our vantage point. While we may not find a true Jupiter analogue with this method, we are discovering planets with Jupiter-like sizes and orbits similar to that of Earth."
Dragomir said only a tiny part of the planet's orbit will be observable during transit, and out of more than 600 planet candidates the department has tested, many are potential plants, but confirming them requires a lot of effort.
"It's a substantial undertaking. Identifying these longer-period exoplanets can be rare due to the intricate alignment of various factors,” Dragomir said.