What did
that Ogle find?
By Skylar Guillaume
January, 2015
I like
astronomy. There is a fun app on the
Ipad that lets me look at exoplanets.
Exoplanets are planets not in our solar system. I happen to bump into a dwarf star on the
simulator. Then, I found out more. The dwarf star is more interesting than I
thought. It is very dim. It is red.
But
what is really interesting to me is its planet.
The planet I am interested in is Ogle-0265Lb. It is like a cold Jupiter. It is the similar size of Jupiter. It is made of gas like Jupiter.
It is
not like Jupiter because it orbits twice as close to its star than our
Jupiter. That means if Ogle-0265Lb was
in our solar system it would be just outside of Mars’s orbit.
The planet orbits the dwarf star
I mentioned earlier. A dwarf star is
very dim. So dim that if you cut our sun
into 100 pieces, the dwarf star would be as bright as 4 of the pieces. So it is dim, that means. It is cool, compared to the sun, but it is
not cool compared to Neptune. That means
even if the planet is closer than Jupiter, Ogle-0265Lb is cooler.
Do you
know how the astronomers found Ogle-0265Lb?
They almost found it by accident.
They were looking at another star and they saw this other star get
brighter. The getting brighter happened
in something called gravitational lensing.
The dwarf star bent the light from the other star so the light pointed
on earth the most!
They
expected the graph showing the light from the distant star be a nice smooth
curve but do you know what the graph looked like?
 |
| This: instead of this. |
Do you
know what the little down was? The
planet blocking a little of the light!
This is how they found the planet.
Now you
know how interesting Ogle-0265Lb is. If
you want to know more, buy the exoplanet app on your Ipad and search for
Ogle-0265Lb.
