Remember when finding evidence of planets circling other stars was big, big news? Like all things scientific, it quickly became pretty routine, at least for the astrophysics set.
Dartmouth reports that a physics and astronomy major who just graduated found two of them by analyzing data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
He developed, as part of his undergraduate thesis project, a computer model of the exoplanet system that simulates how the star’s brightness would vary on account of orbiting planets with certain estimated physical parameters, including size, period of revolution, and orbital radius. These physical parameters are iteratively adjusted until the algorithm can find a model of the exoplanet system whose light curve matches the observed data.
The whole story is here.
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