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Would it be feasible to place telescopes at other orbital inclinations with respect to the sun in order to spot transits in stars that aren't within Earth's orb
by SJC_Hacker 2y ago
Would it be feasible to place telescopes at other orbital inclinations with respect to the sun in order to spot transits in stars that aren't within Earth's orbital plane ?
- teraflop 2y agoThe orbital inclination relative to our sun doesn't really have anything to do with it. In fact, stars that are aligned with Earth's orbit are harder to observe, because they go behind the sun once a year. Detecting an extrasolar planetary transit requires us to be aligned with the planet's orbit around its star. And since those stars are so far away, you would have to travel an immense distance away from our solar system to appreciably change the relative angle. HD 20794 is about 20 light-years away from us, so changing our observation angle relative to it by 1 degree would require traveling about 0.35 lightyears. Our fastest-ever interstellar probe, Voyager 1, would take 5000 years to travel that distance.
- hajola 2y agoThanks for the clarification. You are absolutely right, in my post above I accidentally used the word "parallel" that caused the confusion. It wouldn't even be practically possible to use PLATO to observe them. Here's a visual if that's helpful to any reader: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Geometric-Probability-for-Proper-Orbital-Alignment-to-See-a-Transit-To-observe-a_fig1_226590554 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Geometric-Probability-fo... .