A better way of searching for alien planets

Researchers believe they’ve come up with a new, more accurate method for determining the strength of surface gravity on distant, faint stars. And painting more accurate pictures of stars is vital to studying the alien worlds that orbit them.

“If you don’t know the star, you don’t know the planet,” the University of British Columbia’s Jaymie Matthews, a co-author of the research published last week in Science Advances, said in a statement. You have to determine the strength of gravity on a star’s surface before you can calculate its size and mass, assuming the star isn’t close enough to measure directly.

When scientists go looking for alien exoplanets — ones that sit far outside our solar system — they rely entirely on those planets’ host stars. Measuring the way a star’s light appears to flicker and dim from Earth’s perspective allows scientists to calculate an astonishing number of things about the planets transiting around that star, including whether they’re the right size and distance from the star to hold liquid water.

Many stars imaged by the Kepler space telescope are too far away or dim for scientists to study the planets around them effectively. That’s where the new technique, called the autocorrelation function time scale technique, comes in. Led by the University of Vienna’s Thomas Kallinger, researchers from Europe, Canada and Australia determined that using the time scale of variations in a star’s brightness may be more accurate for determining gravity than the degree of brightness itself.

When they tested the time scale method on stars that are close enough to be studied with standard techniques, they found it to be about six times more accurate than the flicker method, which was developed in 2013 to study distant stars by measuring the brightness of short variations caused by the bubbling of the star’s gas.