Exoplanets: A World Beyond Our Solar System
Detecting exoplanets can be a challenging task and we often have to rely on their heavier and brighter counterparts to detect the presence of planets. Most exoplanets are found through indirect methods: measuring the dimming of a star that happens to have a planet pass in front of it, called the transit method, or monitoring the spectrum of a star for the tell-tale signs of a planet pulling on its star and causing its light to subtly Doppler shift. Space telescopes have found thousands of planets by observing “transits,” the slight dimming of light from a star when its tiny planet passes between it and our telescopes. Using telescopic data, astronomers analyze changes in the brightness of a star when a planet passes in front of it (known as a transit) or in frequency due to the Doppler effect caused by the star’s wobble around a common center of mass, or Barycenter, indicating the presence of one or more planets. This method has been instrumental in discovering thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, providing a glimpse into the diversity of planetary systems in the universe.
For the purpose of this article, we are going to find the orbital parameters of a particular planet - HD 86081 from radial velocity data of the corresponding star - HD 86081. The data is attained from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. We have the data of the radial velocity of this star that has been calculated from the data of the Doppler’s shift. Of course, this radial velocity is not the original velocity of the star but a component along the axis of our telescope. This should also theoretically follow a periodic pattern. In figure 1, we have a scattered plot of our raw data of radial velocity of the star and at first glance, there does appear any pattern in the data. A noticeable aspect of the data is that there are some promi- nent intervals of time when no data is collected.