Sunday, December 24, 2017 23 Are we alone? You can’t imagine humanity hasn’t asked that question from the very beginning looking up at the stars. It’s kind of the ultimate question: What else is out there? EXOPLANETS From page 21 An artist’s rendering of Kepler-78b, an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet discovered by Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using Kepler Space Telescope data, and confirmed by Andrew Howard with the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, using the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Maunakea. The former was pioneered at CFHT in the 1980s, Moutou said. “A few dozen planets were searched for and it was 10 years before the first one was discovered,” she said. “They missed it by that much.” The credit for finding the first exoplanet around a sun-like star goes to Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who announced the discovery of 51 Pegasi-b in 1995. They found the needle in the haystack that everyone else missed. “At the time, they thought it was due to stellar rotation and not planets,” Moutou said, regarding earlier observations. “… You have to break that wall and say, ‘That’s a discovery.’” The planet, a “hot Jupiter,” is a gas giant with an orbit tighter than Mercury’s, making the gravitational dance it has with its host star more pronounced and easier to detect. On this world, a year lasts a mere four days. It technically wasn’t the first exoplanet. A few years before, planets were detected orbiting a dead star known as a pulsar, leaving the possibility that the planets were a byproduct of the star’s supernova. What made the ‘95 discovery significant was that the planet orbits a sun more similar to our own. And that opened the floodgates. “Maybe not all of them, but most of them have a planetary system,” Moutou said regarding stars in the galaxy. “Many of them have several planets.” In the field of exoplanet discoveries, See EXOPLANETS Page 24 Peter Michaud | Gemini spokesman Hawaii Tribune-Herald
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