ALONE? outside our solar system When the discovery of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting another star — was announced in 1995, it represented an earth-shattering moment for astronomy, recalled Claire Moutou. Suddenly, a whole new era of research was born, and with it, the possibility of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. “The impact was tremendous because no one was really working on exoplanets at the time in the ’90s,” said Moutou, a resident astronomer with Canada-France- Hawaii Telescope atop Maunakea. That changed overnight as researchers raced to find more. Like others, Moutou, who was a student in France at the time, jumped on board. Instead of focusing on interstellar dust, as she had intended, Moutou became a planet hunter, and she hasn’t stopped since. “What we have found so far is much more diverse than what we have in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald solar system,” she said. “That is exciting.” So far, about 3,500 exoplanets, many orbiting too close to their star to host life, have been discovered. Planet hunting is a team effort usually involving multiple telescopes. Moutou said that makes it hard to estimate how many she has helped discover. “It’s nothing that I consider mine,” she said. “It’s teamwork.” One of the discoveries she worked on was Corot-7b, located 489 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. About 70 percent larger than Earth, the planet was the smallest to have been measured until Kepler-10b was found in 2011. Both are scorched worlds, with surface temperatures that exceed that of lava on Earth. Exoplanets are discovered in two ways: radial velocity, which measures the gravitational tug a planet has on its star, and the transit method. For the latter, astronomers search for dips in a star’s light caused by the planet passing in front of it. By TOM CALLIS Hawaii Tribune-Herald See EXOPLANETS Page 23
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