Type of site | Astronomy |
|---|---|
| Created by | Operated for NASA by JPL/Caltech |
| URL | http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu |
| Current status | Closed |
The NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED) is an on-line astronomical stellar and exoplanet catalog and data service that collates and cross-correlates astronomical data and information on exoplanets and their host stars. NStED is dedicated to collecting and serving important public data sets involved in the search for and characterization of exoplanets and their host stars. The data include stellar parameters (such as positions, magnitudes, and temperatures), exoplanet parameters (such as masses and orbital parameters) and discovery/characterization data (such as published radial velocity curves, photometric light curves, images, and spectra).
The NStED collects and serves public data to support the search for and characterization of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) and their host stars. The data include published light curves, images, spectra and parameters, and time-series data from surveys that aim to discover transiting exoplanets. All data are validated by the NStED science staff and traced to their sources. NStED is the U.S. data portal for the CoRoT mission.
As of December 2011, SDtED is no longer in operation. Most data and services have been transferred to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.
Data are searchable either for an individual star or by stellar and planetary properties.
NStED offers direct access to frequently accessed tables:
NStED also serves photometric time-series data from surveys that aim to discover transiting exoplanets such as Kepler and the CoRoT. NStED provides access to over 500,000 light curves from space and ground-based exoplanet transit survey programs, including:
The transit survey data are linked to an online periodogram service that can be used to search for periods in the transit survey data sets. A user can also upload their own time series data to search for periods in their own data.
The planetary orbital parameters are linked to an online transit ephemeris prediction tool which can be used to predict the probability that an exoplanet may transit and the date/time and observability of the transits.
CoRoT was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly those of large terrestrial size, and to perform asteroseismology by measuring solar-like oscillations in stars. The mission was led by the French Space Agency (CNES) in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) and other international partners.
In astronomy, a transit is a phenomenon when a celestial body passes directly between a larger body and the observer. As viewed from a particular vantage point, the transiting body appears to move across the face of the larger body, covering a small portion of it.
The Kepler space telescope is a retired space telescope launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009, into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. After nine years of operation, the telescope's reaction control system fuel was depleted, and NASA announced its retirement on October 30, 2018.
An exomoon or extrasolar moon is a natural satellite that orbits an exoplanet or other non-stellar extrasolar body.
TrES-2b is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star GSC 03549-02811 located 750 light years away from the Solar System. The planet has been identified in 2011 as the darkest known exoplanet, reflecting less than 1% of any light that hits it. The planet's mass and radius indicate that it is a gas giant with a bulk composition similar to that of Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, but similar to many planets detected around other stars, TrES-2b is located very close to its star, and belongs to the class of planets known as hot Jupiters. This system was within the field of view of the Kepler spacecraft.
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported as of April 2014 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.
GSC 03549-02811, also known as Kepler-1) is a yellow main-sequence star similar to our Sun. This star is located approximately 700 light-years away in the constellation of Draco. The apparent magnitude of this star is 11.41, which means it is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with a medium-sized amateur telescope on a clear dark night. The age of this star is about 5 billion years.
Kepler-7 is a star located in the constellation Lyra in the field of view of the Kepler Mission, a NASA operation in search of Earth-like planets. It is home to the fourth of the first five planets that Kepler discovered; this planet, a Jupiter-size gas giant named Kepler-7b, is as light as styrofoam. The star itself is more massive than the Sun, and is nearly twice the Sun's radius. It is also slightly metal-rich, a major factor in the formation of planetary systems. Kepler-7's planet was presented on January 4, 2010 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Kepler-9 is a sunlike star in the constellation Lyra. Its planetary system, discovered by the Kepler Mission in 2010 was the first detected with the transit method found to contain multiple planets.
A Kepler object of interest (KOI) is a star observed by the Kepler space telescope that is suspected of hosting one or more transiting planets. KOIs come from a master list of 150,000 stars, which itself is generated from the Kepler Input Catalog (KIC). A KOI shows a periodic dimming, indicative of an unseen planet passing between the star and Earth, eclipsing part of the star. However, such an observed dimming is not a guarantee of a transiting planet, because other astronomical objects—such as an eclipsing binary in the background—can mimic a transit signal. For this reason, the majority of KOIs are as yet not confirmed transiting planet systems.
HAT-P-32b is a planet in the orbit of the G-type or F-type star HAT-P-32, which is approximately 950 light years away from Earth. HAT-P-32b was first recognized as a possible planet by the planet-searching HATNet Project in 2004, although difficulties in measuring its radial velocity prevented astronomers from verifying the planet until after three years of observation. The Blendanal program helped to rule out most of the alternatives that could explain what HAT-P-32b was, leading astronomers to determine that HAT-P-32b was most likely a planet. The discovery of HAT-P-32b and of HAT-P-33b was submitted to a journal on 6 June 2011.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is an online astronomical exoplanet catalog and data service that collects and serves public data that support the search for and characterization of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) and their host stars. It is part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center and is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. The archive is funded by NASA and was launched in early December 2011 by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute as part of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. In June 2019, the archive's collection of confirmed exoplanets surpassed 4,000.
Kepler-80, also known as KOI-500, is a Red dwarf star of the spectral type M0V. This stellar classification places Kepler-80 among the very common, cool, Class M stars that are still within their main evolutionary stage, known as the Main Sequence. Kepler-80, like other Red dwarf stars, is smaller than the Sun, and it has both radius, mass, temperatures, and luminosity lower than that of our own star. Kepler-80 is found approximately 1,218 light years from the Solar System, in the stellar constellation Cygnus, also known as the Swan.
Kepler-69c is a confirmed super-Earth extrasolar planet, likely rocky, orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-69, the outermost of two such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. It is located about 2,430 light-years from Earth.
Kepler-86, PH2 or KIC 12735740, is a G-type star 1,130 ly (350 pc) distant within the constellation Cygnus. Roughly the size and temperature of the Sun, PH2 gained prominence when it was known to be the host of one of 42 planet candidates detected by the Planet Hunters citizen science project in its second data release. The candidate orbiting around PH2, known as PH2 b, had been determined to have a spurious detection probability of only 0.08%, thus effectively confirming its existence as a planet.
Kepler-62e is a super-Earth exoplanet discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of Kepler-62, the second outermost of five such planets discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Kepler-62e is located about 1,200 light-years (370 pc) from Earth in the constellation of Lyra. The exoplanet was found using the transit method, in which the dimming effect that a planet causes as it crosses in front of its star is measured. Kepler-62e may be a terrestrial or ocean-covered planet; it lies in the inner part of its host star's habitable zone.
Technosignature or technomarker is any measurable property or effect that provides scientific evidence of past or present technology. Technosignatures are analogous to the biosignatures that signal the presence of life, whether or not intelligent. Some authors prefer to exclude radio transmissions from the definition, but such restrictive usage is not widespread. Jill Tarter has proposed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) be renamed "the search for technosignatures". Various types of technosignatures, such as radiation leakage from megascale astroengineering installations such as Dyson spheres, the light from an extraterrestrial ecumenopolis, or Shkadov thrusters with the power to alter the orbits of stars around the Galactic Center, may be detectable with hypertelescopes. Some examples of technosignatures are described in Paul Davies's 2010 book The Eerie Silence, although the terms "technosignature" and "technomarker" do not appear in the book.
Kepler-1229 is a red dwarf star located about 870 light-years (270 pc) away from the Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. It is known to host a super-Earth exoplanet that orbits within the habitable zone, discovered in 2016.
Kepler-1625 is a 14th-magnitude solar-mass star located in the constellation of Cygnus approximately 8,000 light years away. Its mass is within 5% of that of the Sun, but its radius is approximately 70% larger reflecting its more evolved state. A candidate gas giant exoplanet was detected by the Kepler Mission around the star in 2015, which was later validated as a likely real planet to >99% confidence in 2016. In 2018, the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project reported that this exoplanet has evidence for a Neptune-sized exomoon around it, based on observations from NASA’s Kepler Mission. Subsequent observations by the larger Hubble Space Telescope provided compounding evidence for a Neptune-sized satellite, with an on-going debate about the reality of this candidate signal.
TOI 700 is a red dwarf 101.4 light-years away from Earth located in the Dorado constellation that hosts TOI 700 d, the first Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TOI 700 is the brightest known host of a transiting habitable-zone Earth-sized planet discovered to date.
