Press release: Are we being watched? Tens of other worlds could spot the Solar System ?>

Press release: Are we being watched? Tens of other worlds could spot the Solar System

Image showing where transits of our Solar System planets can be observed. Each line represents where one of the planets could be seen to transit, with the blue line representing Earth; an observer located here could detect us. Credit: 2MASS / A. Mellinger / R. Wells.
Image showing where transits of our Solar System planets can be observed. Each line represents where one of the planets could be seen to transit, with the blue line representing Earth; an observer located here could detect us. Credit: 2MASS / A. Mellinger / R. Wells.
This is a week full of press releases: my other PhD student, Rob Wells, just published a paper in MNRAS about transit zones (places in the sky where an extraterrestrial observer could detect our solar system planets through transits). There are about 70 currently known exoplanet systems that are located in the solar system’s transit zones. None of those have any known habitable zone planets, but prospects of finding a habitable system with mutual transit visibility are good: the Kepler-K2 mission looks at exactly the right locations in the sky (namely the ecliptic) to find them. The Royal Astronomical Society did a really neat press release about our work today: https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/3042-are-we-being-watched-tens-of-other-worlds-could-spot-the-earth.

“Transit Visibility Zones of the Solar System Planets“, Wells, R.; Poppenhaeger, K.; Watson, C. A.; Heller, R., accepted for publication by MNRAS (2017).

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