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Science MARVELS project by NASA looks for new planets
Science MARVELS project by NASA looks for new planets | MARVELS project by NASA looks for new planets |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Saturday, 10 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Besides discovering exoplanets, the MARVELS project will also help astronomers learn more about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. The project will be centered about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope at the Apache Point Observatory, which is located in the Sacramento Mountains near Sunspot, New Mexico (United States). The telescope has a 2.5-meter primary mirror and a wide field of view that encompasses seven square degrees of sky. That size is comparable to an area that would contain over thirty-five of the Earth’s Moon. Besides this impressive ability, the telescope also can separately image sixty stars simultaneously. In the future, this sixty-star capacity will be increased to 120 stars. The telescope is able to accomplish these amazing feats of astronomical discovery by the use of very sensitive interferometers and the method called Doppler shift (or Doppler Effect). The instruments called interferometers are designed to measure very small changes in the frequency of light from a star. When a planet is orbiting a star, its gravity slightly changes the frequency of the light that emerges from that star. The Doppler shift is the change of frequency (or wavelength) of a wave as observed by someone moving relative to the source of the wave. For instance, the perceived change in the sound of a train’s horn as it first moves toward and, then later, away from a listener is an example of the Doppler shift. The process of discovering new planets around stars is just beginning. The next six years will most likely produce a treasure trove of new planets discovered around stars. These discoveries no doubt will help astronomers learn more about how planets like the Earth were first formed, how solar system and galaxies were formed and how they continue to evolve, and maybe even produce a hint of life out there in the Universe
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