Stockton college professor part of a team of planet hunters that found something unsual
A University of the Pacific professor is part of a team that has made a new out-of-this-world discovery.
Daniel Jontof-Hutter is an astronomy and physics professor at UOP in Stockton, but lately, he's been spending his time as a planet hunter.
"You have to monitor the stars very, very closely for a very long time," Jontof-Hutter said.
He's part of a team searching the skies for exoplanets that orbit stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. They are using images from the Kepler space telescope, which blasted off from the earth in 2009.
"It's a massive data set, but in that data are planets waiting to be discovered," Jontof-Hutter said.
He recently found something unusual.
"Extremely rare. Most of the planets that we found around other stars are single planets," Jontof-Hutter said.
But his team found one star - named Kepler-385 - that has seven planets.
"And when you have so many planets, there's so much more you can learn about the system," Jontof-Hutter said.
So how are these new exoplanets discovered?
"Every time it passes in front of a star, there's a slight dip in the brightness of the star because the planet is partially obscuring it," Jontof-Hutter said. "You can measure that change in brightness."
He said they're definitely not a place you'd want to visit.
"They are much closer to their star than the earth is to the sun, so they're too hot for life or water or anything like that," Jontof-Hutter said.
He hopes this research will inspire his students at UOP to become the next generation of planet hunters.
"It is a pleasure to work with students at UOP where we can get them involved in doing scientific research," Jontof-Hutter said. "We are trying to find out how common planetary systems are and it's a big step on answering the question 'Are we alone?' "
The professor will be back in the classroom next year teaching beginning astronomy, and he's also using another NASA telescope to continue looking for more planets all over the sky.
