How to study light and confirm a potential exoplanet

Daily Current Affairs Dated On 22-Feb-2020 Wait and watch

So far many significant electoral reforms have taken place have emanated from the Supreme Court. For Ex:

1. None of the Above (NOTA) 2. Lily Thomas vs Union of India case, wherein a parliamentarian or legislator convicted of an offence that leads to a sentence of two years and more will be debarred from contesting an election for six years after his or her prison term ends.

Why in news?

Sub-Neptune sized planet validated with the habitable-zone planet finder

Details:

A signal originally detected by the Kepler spacecraft has been validated as an exoplanet using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), an astronomical spectrograph built by a Penn State team and recently installed on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. The HPF provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby low-mass stars, and astronomers used it to validate the candidate planet by excluding all possibilities of contaminating signals to very high level of probability. The planet, called G 9-40b, is about twice the size of the Earth, but likely closer in size to Neptune, and orbits its low mass host star, an M dwarf star, only 100 light years from Earth. Kepler detected the planet by observing a dip in the host star’s light as the planet crossed in front of — or transited — the star during its orbit, a trip completed every six Earth days.