Multiple Planet Systems
What if there is more than one planet orbiting a distant star? Can light curves help figure out if there are multiple planets? Yes! The video shows animated light curves for the star TRAPPIST-1. The dips in brightness show that there are at least seven planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
Now take a closer look at the TRAPPIST-1 light curve at the right. This data includes measurements by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope over three weeks in 2016 and by other telescopes on the ground. Each dot represents an observation at a time point. The white dots are data measured by the Spitzer telescope. The blue dots are from observations taken with ground-based telescopes that were used to fill in the gaps in the data.
The light curves have a baseline of 99.5 percent. Look for patterns in the dips. Each letter represents a different exoplanet.
Click to see larger version
Study the data and answer the questions in the following table. Be sure to support each answer with evidence from data, images, graphs, or text from the lesson.
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