As San Antonio becomes a hub for searching for life beyond Earth, a UTSA team uses a tool-pairing strategy to find planets outside our solar system.
in the early 1990s. Both the Gaia and Hipparcos precisely measured the positions and motions of stars in the Milky Way. From the data, the team identified stars that “appeared to change position on the night sky in a way that suggested they were each orbited by a giant planet,” the space agencyAmong the astronomical objects, they noted HIP 99770, a star with a temperature of about 13,940 degrees Fahrenheit — 40 percent hotter than the sun — and a mass nearly twice that of the sun.
The imaging and astrometry data together showed the expolanet is bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Few exoplanets are big enough and far enough from its star’s glare to be direct-imaged. He smiled at the success of his team’s work. “We have all these lines of evidence together that gives us the conclusion that what we’re seeing is a planet orbiting a star,” he said.Growing up on a farm in Kansas, Currie became interested in astronomy watching PBS and “Star Trek.” His interests led him to complete his PhD at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and working at NASA between 2018 and August 2022.
He says combining astrometry and direct imaging strategies should lead to the discovery of more exoplanets — and he’s already been reviewing data from Gaia and Hipparcos to get a bead on more catalogued stars with orbiting companions.
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