Europe announces his telescope hunter extrasolar planets - The País.com (Spain)

Dish Space Telescope, a specialized search for extrasolar Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars to the Solar System Observatory, has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to form part of its scientific program. It will be launched into space in 2024 and devoted, for six years at least to look a million stars with a battery of 34 telescopes integrated into a single platform. “Plato will allow us to find planets that orbit its star in the so-called habitable zone, ie, in which there may be liquid water and which can keep life as we know it,” said the leader of the Heike Rauer mission, a researcher at the German Space Agency (DLR). “Plato will start a whole new chapter in the exploration of extrasolar planets.”

Plato can measure sizes, masses and ages of planetary systems that find and observations will be supplemented by future European giant telescope E-ELT (European Southern Observatory, ESO) and James Webb , the Hubble great substitute being prepared by NASA in collaboration with the ESA.

Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet orbiting a star other than the Sun, in 1995, found more than a thousand celestial objects of this type, some of them forming multiple planetary systems. But only a handful of them have been able to determine precisely the mass, radius and age, say astronomers at the University of Warwick involved in the new European project. And remember, added, knowing that only mass and size (radius) can distinguish between a miniature Neptune, a planet of high gas content and low density, one rocky like Earth.

Plato (stands for Planetary Transit and Oscillations of stars) used a technique called transit search for planets. When one of these bodies crosses in front of its star in the line of sight from Earth, the light of the sun is tempered slightly and these periodic variations in brightness reveal the eyes of telescopes like Plato’s presence on the planet. The same search strategy followed, for example, Kepler of NASA, who has registered dozens of extrasolar planets on its list of discoveries Space Telescope.

“Plato, with its unique ability to find similar systems to the Sun-Earth, will build on the accumulated experience of other European missions like CoRoT and Cheops” recalls Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s scientific director said in a statement institution. “Their findings will help position the architecture of our Solar System in the context of other planetary systems.”

future planet hunter ESA will be sent to Lagrange 2, an imaginary point in space, a million and a half miles from Earth, where mutually cancel the gravitational pull of our planet and the Sun There are working several telescopes, including the latest released by ESA, the Gaia , which is in the initial testing phase, and there will the James Webb .

Plato will

capacity asteroseismology, ie, to measure the oscillations of stars so that scientists can characterize the stars around which planets detected.