This one is not like the others - this is the research project I completed as part of my Masters degree in Physics.
The Keplar Space telescope spent nine years hunting for exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than the Sun), eventually finding 2662 of them.
Unlike Hubble or the James Webb, Keplar didn’t get pointed at different objects at different times. Instead, it watched one small patch of sky, constantly. Exoplanets were detected using the transit method - when a planet gets between the star and Keplar, it blocks some of its light, and the star’s brightness dips. The size of the dip tells you about the size of the planet and its distance from the star, and the length of time between dips tells you about the orbital period.
The transit method has some obvious limitations. The biggest is that it only works if you’re lucky enough to be looking at the system close to the orbital plane of the planets, otherwise the planet never passes between the star and Keplar. Also, multi-planet systems produce much more complicated light curves.
Another weakness; perhaps less obvious, is this: stars have an intrinsic variability in their brightness. Not every dip is a planet - sometimes it’s just the star doing it’s own thing. The better your understanding of these fluctuations, the easier it is to separate noisy stars from stars with exoplanets.
The project describes some of the sources of these variations and some techniques for finding them in Keplar data.
I’m well aware this is likely of interest to no-one - but dammit, I worked my ass off on this, I’m putting it on my website.