Strange new worlds: Princeton University Exoplanet talk & meeting Professor Josh Winn

Joshua Winn (Left)

After my AI course in the summer in which a team I was in created our own AI model that detects exoplanets. Exoplanets are any planet that are not in our solar system and is orbiting another star.

The AI class sparked my interest in exoplanets and I wanted to learn more about the techniques that are used to find them. So my family and I went to a talk given by Professor Josh Winn at Princeton before the annual Princeton-Harvard football game.

He is the author of the book The Little Book of Exoplanets which explains in detail different methods used by astronomers to detect exoplanets. During the talk, Professor Winn focused on the most common methods used which were, the transit method, radial velocity (doppler method), and direct imaging.

The transit method is the method that our data from the AI course used. It works by pointing a telescope at any star in our universe, then it detects light coming from that star. Astronomers next look for patterns may occur like periods were the light gets dimmer and raises in brightness. In order for there to likely be an exoplanet orbiting the star the light should dim with some sort of consistent pattern. While the light will only dim by .01% in some cases the astronomers are only looking for patterns that occur over period's.

The charts below, I made in my summer AI course that provides an example of an exoplanet on the left (with repeating patterns in the data) and a non-exoplanet on the right.

Exoplanet Light Graph

Non-Exoplanet Light Graph

I liked how Professor Winn explained how to use techniques that astronomers use to discover exoplanets in a concise and easy to understand way.

After the talk, I was able to get his book signed and I talked with Professor Winn about the summer AI project I did on exoplanets. He said that was really cool and thanked me for telling him.