PLATO tagged posts

Europe’s next big space mission – a telescope that will hunt for Earth-like rocky planets outside of our solar system — is on course to launch at the end of 2026.

PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, is being built to find nearby potentially habitable worlds around Sun-like stars that we can examine in detail.

The space telescope will blast into orbit on Europe’s new rocket, Ariane-6, which made its maiden flight last week after being developed at a cost of €4billion (£3.4billion).

Dr David Brown, of the University of Warwick, is giving an update on the mission at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting at t...

The most successful technique for finding planets beyond our solar system so far is transit photometry, which measures changes in a star’s brightness caused by a mini-eclipse. When a planet crosses in front of its star along our line of sight, it blocks some of the star’s light. If the dimming lasts for a set amount of time and occurs at regular intervals, it likely means an exoplanet is passing in front of, or transiting, the star once every orbital period.

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has used this technique to become the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than a thousand established discoveries and many more awaiting confirmation...