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Introduction

 Hi everyone,

Welcome to the blog about our amazing journey through space! Within the scope of the project Hack an exoplanet organized by the European Space Agency (ESA) we turned into space detectives - astrophysicists - and we analysed real data from ESA's satellite Cheops. Would you like to experience the adventure with us? On this blog, you can read about every step we made to explore the exoplanet TOI-560 c. Are you ready for an exciting voyage? 

We recommend reading this blog from the first article to the last, so you can fully enjoy our discoveries!

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About Hack an exoplanet

"Hack an exoplanet" is a new ESA Education project. (If you haven't heard about ESA, it’s the European version of NASA. More information here ) The year 2023 is the first year of this challenge. The project is designed for students between 11 and 19 years old from the whole world. In order to be able to join the challenge you don't need relevant education or any courses. Everyone can participate.  We learned about ESA's project from the Deputy Director of our high school, who sent the informational email to all students. The project immediately impressed us. There are seminars all over the world for all applicants, which are called "hackathons". We joined one of them, which took place in Prague Planetarium from 2 till 3 of June. We spent 24 hours in the building dedicated to the exploration of the universe. We intensively worked on our project, but well, we slept there too. 24 hours is too long for staying awake, the longer after a full day at school. Bu...
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What we know about TOI-560 c

  TOI-560 c was discovered in 2021 by the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). Two years later, ESA’s satellite Cheops came to explore the planet. The Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, in short Cheops, was launched in 2019 and since then it has been studying exoplanets. It characterizes already discovered exoplanets by transit photometry even more precisely than by their discovery. This method records intensity of the light coming illuminated by a star. When a planet transits a star, it is recorded as a weakening of the light. By analyzing this data scientists (and now we) are able to calculate a lot of parameters about the studied planet. TOI-560 c has also the positive that it’s situated in our plane of observation, so we get more accurate data from the observation.
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Discoveries

Our first task was to estimate the planet's radius and mid-transit time by creating a light curve based on this data in the Allesfitter program. The program evaluated our curve and determined how accurate we were and we obtained the correct value to compare with our result. We saw that our estimate of the transit depth had 2,6% deflection from Allesfitter, that was not bad for beginners. From the Allesfitter program we also received more data - the mass of the planet, temperature and time period… (see attached pictures).  Radius A light curve shows percentage values of light coming from the star in time. The difference between the smallest measured value and the maximum is called transit depth. It’s approximately the ratio of the area of the planet's disc and the area of the star's disc. With this ratio, we determined the planet radius (see calculation below) Volume, density The planet's radius is ca. 2.45 larger than of our planet Earth, which means its volume is appro...
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