{"id":88308,"date":"2019-03-02T16:22:20","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T00:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/the-habitable-planet-finder-is-a-new-tool-to-locate-earth-like-exoplanets"},"modified":"2019-03-02T16:22:20","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T00:22:20","slug":"the-habitable-planet-finder-is-a-new-tool-to-locate-earth-like-exoplanets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/the-habitable-planet-finder-is-a-new-tool-to-locate-earth-like-exoplanets","title":{"rendered":"The Habitable Planet Finder Is a New Tool to Locate Earth-like Exoplanets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-habitable-planet-finder-is-a-new-tool-to-locate-earth-like-exoplanets.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers have a new tool to help them find <a href='https:\/\/www.digitaltrends.com\/cool-tech\/best-exoplanets\/'>habitable planets<\/a> in our galaxy: the Habitable Planet Finder (HPF), a high-precision spectrograph. The HPF can be used to detect worlds which have some key qualities, like being a rocky planet orbiting an red dwarf. A red dwarf, also known as an M-dwarf, is a type of star that is relatively cool, small, and dim, and is somewhat similar to our Sun (which is classified as a white or yellow dwarf.) Red dwarfs are common in the Milky Way, like the nearby Barnard\u2019s star, making them good hunting grounds for exoplanets.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAbout 70 percent of the stars in our galaxy are M-dwarfs like Barnard\u2019s star, but the near-infrared light they emit has made it difficult for astronomers to see their planets with ordinary optical telescopes,\u201d Paul Robertson, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, said in a <a href=\"https:\/\/news.uci.edu\/2019\/02\/20\/astronomers-from-uci-other-institutions-use-new-technique-to-find-extrasolar-planets\/\">statement<\/a>. \u201cWith the HPF, it\u2019s now open season for exoplanet hunting on a greatly expanded selection of stellar targets.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The HPF measures subtle changes in the color of light given off by stars, which can indicate the influence of an orbiting planet. In particular, it searches for planets with a low mass located within the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Circumstellar_habitable_zone\">habitable zone<\/a>\u201d of their stars where surface water can exist. The spectrograph has already demonstrated its usefulness by confirming the existence of a super-Earth which is orbiting Barnard\u2019s star during its commissioning, and should be able to detect many more planets similar in size to Earth in the future.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.digitaltrends.com\/cool-tech\/habitable-planet-finder-exoplanets\/\">https:\/\/www.digitaltrends.com\/cool-tech\/habitable-planet-finder-exoplanets\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers have a new tool to help them find habitable planets in our galaxy: the Habitable Planet Finder (HPF), a high-precision spectrograph. The HPF can be used to detect worlds which have some key qualities, like being a rocky planet orbiting an red dwarf. A red dwarf, also known as an M-dwarf, is a type [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}