Published on January 9, 2018
When a distant exoplanet transits, or crosses in front of its star, it causes a slight dip in the star’s brightness. The Kepler space telescope measures this dip in a star’s brightness over time. The U-shaped pattern that emerges is a signal of the presence of a planet as shown by the solid white line. The scatter plot (colored blue) is representative of the recorded data. Credit: Google
