NASA Kepler’s Scientists Are Doing What Seems Impossible: Turning Pixels Into Planets
Imagine looking at one saturated pixel for years on end, and somehow learning what worlds live around it. That’s what science is for!
When you think of what’s out there in the vast recesses of space, glorious images of galaxies, stars, and new worlds probably leap to mind. A combination of the greatest images from Hubble and some gorgeous artistic renderings are how we visualize the Universe, but that’s not what most telescopes or observatories see, and that’s certainly not where most of the science gets done. NASA’s Kepler mission, famous for discovering thousands of planets outside of our Solar System, never actually images a planet. Instead, they simply image an unresolved star, or more accurately, around 100,000 stars at once. After doing that for weeks, months, or years, they announce the discovery of candidate planets, including properties like their radius and orbital period. A raw image shows nothing but pixels of a saturated star, but it’s what you do with the data that counts. Here’s the science of how a few pixels become an entire solar system.
