PHY390GMU

I used MATLAB to create my program for determining the next transits for HAT-P 36, Julian Days, using its most recent transit and its period as known values. For the transit values I focused on the midpoint of each event. The known value was on March 9th which is 2458186.69169 in Julian Days. The period for the exoplanet is 1.327347, so basically to find the next transit you add the period to it, at least according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. I realized that a decimal amount between 0.5 and 0.92 correlates with night at the location of GMU so I incorporated that into my code to weed out some values by using tmp and modulo as you can see below: I used 20 iterations in hopes to find at least 5 potentially observable transits from our location. This provided results shown below (not complete results since I couldn't fit it all on the window): to prove these values are correct I checked with NASA Exoplanet Archive and as you can see: I was right. Thus, the next availab...

Yes, you heard right >:) it's all gone! Within at least half the duration that we used (2700 years) I was able to end the orbit (most likely kill) a majority of the planets within the solar system. I created a planet of mass equal to 0.35 M ☉  with r = 20 which is the close encounter limit (in terms of terrestrial planets). The density I gave it was 1.0 g/cm^3 and I also gave it x, y, and z Cartesian coordinates (in AU) of 2AU, (1E-08)AU, (1E-08)AU. This gave my planet an initial semi-major axis of 4.26AU. The v_x, v_y, v_z of the body in Cartesian coordinates, in AU/day, are (3E-06)AU/day, (1.75E-02)AU/day, and (1E-08)AU/day, respectively. After running the program I looked at the semi-major axis and eccentricity of each planet within our solar system and realized that all, but Mercury, were affected, as you can see below: (the time axis for all are related to the time in years except Mercury where time axis should be multiplied by 10 to refer to the actual year. As y...

import xlrd file_location = "C:/Users/Heena Chotani/Desktop/data.xlsx" workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(file_location) sheet = workbook.sheet_by_index(0) JDdata = () #julian date Ydata = () #period TDdata = () #transit duration PUdata = () #propagation uncertianity n = () #number of future transits rows = sheet.nrows rows = rows - 1 for col in range(sheet.ncols): if sheet.cell_value(0, col) == 'jd': for row in range(sheet.nrows): JDdata = (sheet.cell_value(row, col)) elif sheet.cell_value(0, col) == 'Y': for row in range(sheet.nrows): Ydata = (sheet.cell_value(row, col)) elif sheet.cell_value(0, col) == 'TD': for row in range(sheet.nrows): TDdata = (sheet.cell_value(row, col)) elif sheet.cell_value(0, col) == 'PU': for row in range(sheet.nrows): PUdata = (sheet.cell_value(row, col)) elif sheet.cell_value(0, col) == 'futuretransits': for row in range(sheet.nrows): n = (sheet.cell_val...

The inserted parameters: Event Midpoint JD UT (days) =  2458186.69173 Period (days) = 1.327347000 Formula used to find next known transit: T_transit (JD UT) = JD + P *n  I used a online converter to change the JD back to Calendar date and time. The boxes highlighted in green at the night where it would be visible for us to see. So out of the 50 transits, only 19 would occur at night on campus.  Planet Event Midpoint JD UT (days) Period (days) n T_transit (JD UT days) T_transit (Calendar UT) HAT-P 36 2458186.69173 1.327347000 1 2458188.019077 2018-Mar-10 12:27:28.25 2 2458189.346424 2018-Mar-11 20:18:51.03 3 2458190.673771 2018-Mar-13 04:10:13.81 4 2458192.001118 2018-Mar-14 12:01:36.6 5 2458193.328465 2018-Mar-15 19:52:59.38 6 2458194.655812 2018-Mar-17 03:44:22.16 ...