Gaia found brand new exoplanets among the sea of 1.7 billion it is watching - by AndyTomaswick
But that’s not all; the international team of researchers involved in analyzing and releasing Gaia’s data sets thought they might be able to find other ghosts hiding in the star cataloger’s data. Thousands of exoplanets have been found thus far, many of them using the radial-velocity method of watching a star move back and forth as the orbiting planet’s gravity makes it jiggle slightly in the sky. They believed that Gaia could do just that.
With Gaia’s super precise instruments, it was well placed to detect the minute changes in a star’s position when it was disturbed by a planet. In fact, the team utilized photometric data sets from all three primary instruments on the craft. They then fed that data into a training algorithm that used TESS’s exoplanet survey results to help train the algorithm on what to look for as a positive exoplanet finding.
What they did find were at least two new planets. Now known as Gaia-1 and Gaia-2, these two planets are both “hot Jupiters” – giant planets that have an orbital period so fast that they are tidally locked to their star. However, despite first having shown up in the Gaia data, the existence of the planets was confirmed by observations from TESS, an observatory much more focused on exoplanet hunting.TESS has an entirely different underlying observational strategy than Gaia.
Overall that is an excellent record for Gaia searching for things it was not designed for. But there is more yet to come, with the next release of Gaia data, known as DR3, expected for release in June this year. There is undoubtedly evidence of even more exoplanets just waiting to be found in Gaia’s new data with this newly trained algorithm.
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