Are There Extra-Ordinary Objects Near Extra-solar Planets?

By Rebecca K. Higley

Purpose – To attempt to find extra-ordinary objects around newly found extra-solar planets using existing astronomical photographic surveys available online.

Hypothesis - One can use astronomical photographic surveys (available online) that have been conducted over the last 50 years to detect extra-ordinary objects near known newly found extra-solar planetary systems, 88 of which have been discovered since 1995 with a total of 101 orbiting giant planets.  Most of the planets have been detected indirectly with non-visual methods; this may be the first written comprehensive visual light photographic examination of the environments surrounding all known extra-solar planetary systems, so the chance for a new discovery may be high.

Procedure – The following is my step-by-step procedure for this experiment:

I looked at each extra-solar planetary system one planet at a time, first with the oldest photographic image of it, and then I compared the same star with a later picture of it, so as to check for any thing or any motion that was out of the ordinary. I repeated these steps for all of the stars that I viewed throughout my project.

Data Collection Procedure:

I first generated a list of stars known to have planets by going to The Extra-Solar Planets Encyclopaedia at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/catalog.html.  Then one by one, I entered the stars into the online virtual telescope called SkyView at http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

 to generate at least one image (and up to six) of each target star, and saved each image to my local hard-drive for animation processing (when more than one image was available.)  I set the field of view/ image size for each sky survey image to 0.1 degrees so that each image would be uniform for comparison and could be over-lain precisely.  Each generated image was 300 pixels by 300 pixels and they were taken from the the Digital Sky Surveys known as  DSS 1, DSS 2 Red, DSS 2 Blue, this Digitized survey comprises the compressed digitization of the Southern Sky Survey and the Northern hemisphere’s Palomar Sky Survey as distributed on CD ROM by the Space Telescope Science Institute. Coverage of the entire sky is included. The Southern Sky Survey was conducted at the UK Southern Schmidt Survey Group by the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh (prior to 1988) and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (since 1988) The photographic plates were digitized at the Space Telescope Science Institute. These data are distributed on a set of 101 CD-ROMs.  I also used a survey which is made up of the archives of the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) project. NEAT is designed to look for potentially hazardous asteroids (i.e. those whose orbits cross the Earth's, but is also useful for comparing images with other surveys to discover changes over time.  Over 200,000 images are available in the NEAT archive.  I also looked at the 2 MASS near infra-red telescope survey.  2MASS has just completed uniformly scanning the entire sky in three near-infrared bands (that’s like the light sent from your TV remote control “clicker” to your TV set) to detect and characterize point sources and has achieved an 80,000-fold improvement in sensitivity relative to earlier surveys. 2MASS used two highly-automated 1.3-meter telescopes, one at Mt. Hopkins in Arizona and the other on a very high and dry mountain in Chile.

Materials needed: A computer and its standard peripherals such as a printer, modem, monitor and its operating system software, an internet connection, GIF animation software to sequence the images of a particular star to see if there are any changes. 

Results - After looking at all of the 88 planetary systems known to have a total 101 extra-solar planets, I found:

1.  No extremely obvious markers of artificial looking objects in the 450-600 THz range (i.e. approximately what the human eye can see, the optical range).  Obvious markers to me means no geometric shapes or strange configurations that jump out as being extra-ordinary or abnormal.  I didn’t even see any nebulosity (fuzzy looking clouds of light/dust) or dust disks, and I know that some of these systems have been reported online to have dust disks associated with them.

2.  Making animations of photos taken many years apart from various surveys available at SKYVIEW, I found that many of the objects have very high relative velocities to the background field of stars.  I found at the because many of them are near us, the move a lot more than the background stars due to something called the Parallax effect.  The most obvious of them being HD 114762 (you can check it out your self online with SKYVIEW by doing one frame from DSS I and another from DSS2 Red, you’ll see that this star is really moving fast!

3.  When I looked at the star known by its number HD 196050, I found that it might have something near it called a gravitational lens (which is caused by a very massive object, like a black-hole bending the light of objects behind it around it, making one object behind the black-hole appear as if it is two or more copies.  I believe this may be the case because two extremely similar looking elongated galaxy-like filaments that are parallel to each other, centered on the star, but offset from it at the 2 o'clock position of the DSS 1 frame.  Maybe somebody someday will be able to check out the light of the twin galaxies to see if they match; this would show that it is a gravitationally lensed galaxy.

4.  When I looked at the star known by its number HD 80606, it looks like a pair of headlights coming at you.  It is a very nicely matched twin pair of stars, I wonder if they orbit each other?  It would be, hard to believe that they don’t!

5.  The most interesting extra-solar planetary system to look at was 70 Virginis.  When I looked at DSS-I taken ~50 years ago, a trio of very clear looking star-like objects (it wasn’t hair or a grainy image) appear near 70 Virginis, but in DSS 2 Red (taken many years later) the trio disappears, and they aren't in other later images, DSS 2 blue or NEAT either.  I stepped back the view from a 0.1 degree field of view in 0.1 degree increments all the way to 0.6 degrees but couldn't see the trio of star-like objects that appeared in the first image (I thought that maybe they were moving at really high velocities and moved out of the field of view, but they were nowhere to be found.)  My guess is that sometime between when the first DSS 1 image was taken and when the DSS 2 image was taken the three star-like objects either merged with 70 Virginis, interacted with it either by crashing into it or they were ejected at very high velocity, or are on the other side of 70 Virginis and may re-appear again in the future.

6.  I made an animation of a star called Upsilon Andromedae, which earlier this year was discovered to be a “binary star” (that means two stars orbiting each other).  The animation was made with DSS I, DSS 2 Red and NEAT.  My father contacted the Astronomers who were the discoverers of the Upsilon Andromedae binary system, and he sent them the animation, and we found out that it was probably the first time that a 3-frame animation has been done of this system in the optical range.  The Astronomer’s scientific discovery paper only used 2 optical image frames and 1 near-infra-red 2MASS image,  NOT 3 optical frames, and they sent some pretty nice e-mails back to us in response which congratulated us on our discovery, which confirms and support their scientific paper and shows that their infra-red image was not just an image artifact.

Conclusions –

·         This experiment confirms that one can use existing astronomical photographic surveys (available online) to detect extra-ordinary objects near known newly found extra-solar planetary systems.

·        A trio of star-like objects near the system known as 70 Virginis has mysteriously disappeared.  I would like to follow-up this experiment by finding more old photos of 70 Virginis to see if the three star-like objects are an artifact of the photographic process.

·        There may be a gravitational lens near HD 196050 and I would like to follow-up by checking the spectra of the two galaxy-like objects near HD 196050 to see if it is a possible gravitationally lensed background galaxy, its nearness to a known extra-solar planetary system would be interesting and unique.

·        This experiment confirms that many of the extra-solar planet parent stars have very high relative velocities to the background field of stars.

·        HD 80606 looks like a pair of very nicely matched stars, and is probably a close-in binary star.

·        This may be the first time that visual-light photographic examination of the environments surrounding all known extra-solar planetary systems has been done and put into writing.

References:

Extra-Solar Planets Encyclopaedia

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/catalog.html

NASA’s SkyView Virtual Online Observatory

http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg

http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/alapre.pl

Harvard’s List of Astronomical Image Sources

http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/astro.image.html

A Scientific paper published in Astrophysics Journal - A Distant Stellar Companion in the Upsilon Andromedae System – Authors – Patrick  J. Lowrance, J. Davy Kirkpatrick and Charles A. Beichman

Available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0205277

People who helped me:

My father, Jason Higley, who helped me with questions related to astronomy.

Patrick Lowrance, co-discoverer of the Upsilon Andromedae red dwarf binary star companion, who sent a response to an e-mail my father sent for me related to the Upsilon Andromedae animation that we made, part of the e-mail response said:

“… Thanks for the message about your find around Upsilon Andromedae. With

three planets, a disk and now a companion, it may be the Rosetta stone for

planetary evolution. We have been looking around all of the nearby stars

(within 25 parsec = ~ 3000 stars) for wide companions just like these

using the 2MASS database which should be released sometime next month.

We haven't found any as exciting, but we are working hard…”

“…Good Luck! and thanks for the note and image!

Keep looking up,

Patrick Lowrance

Staff Scientist for IRAC on SIRTF

SIRTF Space Center / Infrared Processing and Analysis Center”

And Dr. Charles Beichman, Chief Scientist, Astronomy and Physics Directorate, Jet Propulsion Laboratory who responded to an e-mail saying:

“…Working close to a bright star like Ups And, and trying to find

faint close companions is a real challenge that may await Terrestrial

Planet Finder.

keep looking!

cheers

Dr. Charles Beichman

Chief Scientist, Astronomy and Physics Directorate

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Table of Checked Extra-Solar Planet Parent Stars

(as listed in the Extra Solar Planets Encyclopaedia online, see References above)