For four years, the Kepler space telescope was fixated on one sector of the cosmos. It stared unblinkingly at the Cygnus constellation, trying to detect the slightest variation in star luminance.
UBC student Michelle Kunimoto noticed something everyone else missed, which led her to discover what appear to be four planets that exist outside our solar system.
“I was looking for signs of transits and those are when a planet passes in front of a star, it blocks a portion of the star’s light and if you’re looking at measurements of the brightness, you’ll see a small decrease in the brightness of the star,” she said.
The biggest of the four so-called “exoplanets” — which is 3,200 light years from Earth — is located in a zone that is potentially habitable.
“If it has a moon system, like the giant planets in our own solar system, any of those could be large enough to sustain an atmosphere and thus be able to have liquid water,” Kunimoto said.
Screening petabytes of Kepler data is tedious stuff for most. Yet the 22-year-old Kunimoto managed to see what others couldn’t.
“Students are not just working with data from space telescopes…they’re leading the research and that’s the case with Michelle and this really exciting planet discovery,” Jaymie Matthews, a UBC professor of astronomy, said.
Now she is waiting for other scientists to examine her findings and see if the “planet candidates” are, in fact, planets.
It’s been a heady few days for Kunimoto. Not only is she graduating at a time when her work is garnering international attention, she also recently got to meet her childhood hero. This past weekend, she rubbed elbows with William Shatner, a.k.a Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, who was speaking at UBC’s Point Grey campus. During his speech, Shatner made reference to Kunimoto’s discovery.
“It was completely unexpected. I was completely blown away,” she said.
– With files from Ted Chernecki
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