What other techniques do we use to hunt for alien worlds?

Introducing the transit technique!

For this technique we measure the light of a star & if a planet orbits a star in the line of sight between us & the host star or 'transits' then we can measure the dip in this light https://twitter.com/realscientists/status/1348678442250809347

The bigger the dip in the light, the bigger the planet!

There are many awesome things that we can learn about exoplanets detected using transits & to date it has been the most successful detection technique with over 3000 transiting exoplanetary systems from the @NASAExoArchive

In 2009 @NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft to hunt for transiting exoplanets by watching a patch of space for indications of Earth-sized planets orbiting stars similar to the sun. The area that Kepler watched contains about 150,000 stars like the sun

But in 2013 disaster struck & Kepler lost a 2nd out of 4 reaction wheels on board the spacecraft. Following this failure a new mission concept was created called K2 which was a new concept that enabled continued scientific observations with the Kepler space telescope

Despite this, Kepler continued to thrive & after 9 years of successful planet hunting, Kepler ran out of fuel & retired, leaving a legacy of more than 2600 planet discoveries

In 2018 the successor to Kepler, @NASAExoplanets TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) launched aboard a @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. TESS has already confirmed 91 planets & has more than an astonishing 2400 planet candidates!

Even more recently, @esa launched @ESA_CHEOPS which is the 'CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite'. The mission is dedicated to studying bright, nearby stars that are already known to host exoplanets, in order to make high-precision observations of the planet's size.

You can read about @ESA_CHEOPS first science results by @42Lendl et al. here https://twitter.com/ESA_CHEOPS/status/1310491057189199872