What did you change in the model?
Labs / Astronomy
Exoplanet Transit
A planet drifts in front of its star and the star's brightness dips — the same signal telescopes like Kepler use to find new worlds. Drag up or down over the star to tilt the orbit, or move the sliders, and watch how the depth, shape, and duration of the dip change. The depth is just the planet-to-star area ratio, so the light curve alone reveals the planet's size.
Labs / Astronomy / Exoplanet Transit
Exoplanet Transit
A planet drifts in front of its star and the star's brightness dips — the same signal telescopes like Kepler use to find new worlds. Drag up or down over the star to tilt the orbit, or move the sliders, and watch how the depth, shape, and duration of the dip change. The depth is just the planet-to-star area ratio, so the light curve alone reveals the planet's size.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Astronomy uses patterns in light and motion to explain objects we cannot touch directly. This model lets you change one part of a space system and see what the evidence would look like.
Explore
Try the model
flux 100.00%depth 1.00%duration 0.0 hRp (dip) 0.0 R⊕
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- The dip depth is only about 1% for a giant planet. How big does the planet have to be before the dip becomes obvious?
- Tilt the orbit until the planet just clips the star's edge. What happens to the shape of the dip when the transit is only grazing?
- Keep tilting. At what inclination does the transit vanish altogether — and what does that tell you about which planets we can and can't see this way?
- Stretch the orbital period out to 40 days. Why does the transit last longer, and how much rarer do the dips become?
- During a grazing transit, is the planet radius inferred from the dip too big, too small, or just right compared to the slider?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Look for a cause-and-effect rule: what did you change, what responded, and what stayed the same? Astronomers use those patterns to infer how distant systems work.
Check
Before you leave
What visible evidence changed?
What rule could explain that change?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.