CHESTER, Vt. – Join the Southern Vermont Astronomy Group (SoVerA) on Feb. 13, at 7 p.m., for a presentation by member Claudio Veliz, AIA. This will be a hybrid meeting – in person at our new location, the 1879 Perkinsville Schoolhouse (1862 Vermont Route 106, Perkinsville, Vt.), and online at www.zoom.us/j/94691230307.
With the advent of space-based observatories, and professionally overseen citizen science data evaluation programs in full swing, a growing handful of recent observations have been eluding at least conventional explanation.
Since exoplanets were confirmed to exist in the mid-1990s, their observed behavior has been detected using a number of techniques, especially the “transit system,” which we’ll cover. Then, in 2015, some data collected by the Kepler space telescope regarding one object in particular – in the constellation of Cygnus – was observed displaying inexplicable behavior. The data were seen to fit no understood patterns with which observers were familiar, so far. It was initially dismissed as probably faulty data. However, thorough examinations and reviews of the methodology used confirmed that the data was “clean.” Since then, a handful of other celestial targets, some with even more peculiar characteristics, have been detected.
After a brief review of exoplanet detection methodology, we’ll cover the sorts of light curve patterns which are currently the “norm,” so as to contrast them with those of these confounding objects. We’ll look at a couple of these so-far anomalous exceptions which are getting so much attention by astronomers, and consider a handful of the explanations which have been proposed which can’t discount the potential, if very unlikely, for non-natural causes.
Finally, we’ll review a couple of the remarkable telescopes about to be commissioned, and why we may soon see – and perhaps explain – more of these increasingly mysterious phenomena.
Veliz pursues twin professions in architecture and astronomy. He has owned an award-winning architecture firm – Claudio Veliz Architect PLLC/AIA – since 1982, designing residential, institutional, municipal, retail, and corporate facilities. In his astronomy track, he was cofounder and president of the SoVerA, headquartered in Chester, Vt. Now lecturing in the CALL Program at Keene State College, N.H., previously he worked and lectured at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, and at the astronomy departments of Columbia University and Castleton University. He also conducts data support surveys and time series observations from his Duck Deck Observatory in southern Vermont.