Discovering planets beyond the solar system

After the Copernican heliocentric theory was proposed, people began to speculate that other stars may also be surrounded by planets like our sun, such as Bruno's proposal. This is a reasonable hypothesis, but it is not easy to truly prove it: planets do not emit light, although they can reflect a little bit of the light from the central star, they are much dimmer than stars; And stars are just light points in telescopes, so it is even more difficult to see planets. As early as over a hundred years ago, astronomers began to work hard to detect exoplanets outside the solar system, and many people claimed to have detected exoplanets, but they were ultimately denied by further observations. For example, in 1960, astronomer Peter van der Kamp claimed to have detected a planet orbiting Barnard's Star, which is not too far from us, but later discovered that this may be due to a problem with his observation instruments. It was not until the 1990s that breakthroughs were finally made in exoplanet exploration. follow.

The unit is designed for unsupervised public use: controls are recessed or shielded, moving parts are enclosed, and the interface is operable by a child of about six with no instruction. Where a screen is used, the language can be switched without changing the hardware, and the content can be replaced on site.

1. Exoplanets are generally much dimmer compared to their parent stars and are easily overwhelmed by the light of their parent stars; Alternatively, due to being too close to the parent star or too far away from us, telescopes may not be able to distinguish between planets and parent stars, which can make it difficult to directly image and observe exoplanets. So, currently, some indirect methods are mainly used to discover exoplanets: transit method, radial velocity method, and micro gravitational lensing method. two The "Citizen Scientist" project of "Planet Hunter TESS" focuses on exoplanets outside the solar system, using data from the US exoplanet survey satellite TESS. In the two years after the launch of TESS, more than 20000 volunteers from around the world participated and screened over 12 million sets of data. For the "Planet Hunter TESS" project, crowdfunding is not about idle computing power of computers, but about the volunteers' own participation.