Both are poorly explored neighbors of Earth, but may hold important secrets to understanding the formation of rocky planets, including planets that are Earth-like and potentially habitable. Only two planets-Mercury and Venus-orbit at a distance from the Sun within the range of exoplanets detected by the NASA Kepler mission. The amount of gas, primarily hydrogen and helium, compared to dust is an important aspect of planet formation models. Observations at these wavelengths will indicate whether there is gas-in addition to dust-that is in orbit around these stars. The team, including co-investigators Ben Shappee at IfA, Peter Sadowski at ICS, and IfA graduate student Suchitra Narayanan, is developing improved algorithms to precisely measure changes in the brightness of stars and to detect dimming events in near-real time to direct observations by other telescopes.Ī second effort, supported by NASA and involving IfA graduate student Alexa Anderson, re-purposes a satellite called Swift that usually looks for the flashes of high-energy radiation coming from distant cosmic explosions to monitor these “dipper” stars instead. The centerpiece of the NSF-effort is an observing program using the Las Cumbres Observatory, a global network of small robotic telescopes that can continuously monitor a star, handing off the task from telescope to telescope as the Sun rises on one site and sets at another. Gaidos and his collaborators are using instances where dust from the disk or planet building blocks briefly blocks the star, causing hours-long dimming or “dipping” in the starlight. Instead, investigators must indirectly probe these regions. (Photo credit: NASA)īecause of the vast distances to even the nearest young stars, the most powerful telescopes are often unable to resolve details in the inner zones of planet-forming disks. SOEST Earth Sciences professor Eric Gaidos, lead investigator on two of the grants, explained, “the story of planet formation is like an epic movie, where we could watch only the dramatic opening scene and the happy ending, but missed everything between, leaving us guessing about the main characters, their roles and most of the plot.” Searching vast distances Mercury as imaged by the NASA Messenger spacecraft. The National Science Foundation ( NSF) and NASA recently awarded a total of $1.3 million in three separate grants to teams of UH Mānoa scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences and Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology ( SOEST), the Institute for Astronomy ( IfA), and the Information and Computer Science Department ( ICS) to explore this inner realm around other stars-and our Sun-in search of the secrets to planet formation. But most of the steps between dust and planets are poorly understood, in part because they are obscured within the inner region of these proto-planetary disks. Surveys for planets around other stars, termed “exoplanets,” have discovered that Earth-size and presumably rocky planets are common, and many stars have planets orbiting much closer to their host star than the Earth-Sun distance. Previous research has shown that nearly all stars are born with such disks, and revealed hints of planet formation within them. Planets form from disks of gas and dust that surround young stars. Students visit Bin Chen’s high pressure mineral physics laboratory, learn from Robert Rapp.įrom laboratory experiments to observations of young star systems, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers are on a quest to understand how rocky planets like Earth form.
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