ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY PRESS INFORMATION NOTE

 

EMBARGOED UNTIL 0001 BST, 1 April 2008

 

Date:  28 March 2008

Ref.: PN 08/17 (NAM 08)

 

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Anita Heward

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NAM 2008

 http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk

 

Royal Astronomical Society

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CONTACT DETAILS ARE LISTED AT THE END OF THIS RELEASE

 

RAS PN 08/17 (NAM 08) (EMBARGOED): THE (SUPER)WASP FACTORY FINDS 10 NEW PLANETS IN THE LAST 6 MONTHS

 

In the last 6 months an international team of astronomers have used two batteries of cameras, 
one in the Canary Islands and one in South Africa, to discover 10 new planets in orbit around 
other stars (commonly known as extrasolar planets). The results from the Wide Area Search for 
Planets (SuperWASP) will be announced by team member Dr Don Pollacco of Queen’s University Belfast, 
in his talk at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2008) on Tuesday 1 April.

 

Scientists have found more than 270 extrasolar planets since the first one was discovered in 
the early 1990s. Most of these are detected through their gravitational influence on the star 
they orbit – as it moves the planet pulls on the star, tugging it back and forth. However, making 
these discoveries depends on looking at each star over a period of weeks or months and so the 
pace of discovery is fairly slow.

 

SuperWASP uses a different method. The two sets of cameras watch for events known as transits, 
where a planet passes directly in front of a star and blocks out some of the star’s light, so from 
the Earth the star temporarily appears a little fainter. The SuperWASP cameras work as robots, 
surveying a large area of the sky at once and each night astronomers have data from millions of 
stars that they can check for transits and hence planets. The transit method also allows scientists 
to deduce the size and mass of each planet.

 

Each possible planet found using SuperWASP is then observed by astronomers working at the Nordic 
Optical Telescope on La Palma, the Swiss Euler Telescope in Chile and the Observatoire de Haute 
Provence in southern France, who use precision instruments to confirm or reject the discovery.

 

45 planets have now been discovered using the transit method, and since they started operation in 
2004 the SuperWASP cameras have found 15 of them – making them by far the most successful discovery 
instruments in the world. The SuperWASP planets have masses between a middleweight 0.5 and a huge 
8.3 times that of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System. A number of these new worlds are 
quite exotic. For example, a year on WASP-12B (its orbital period) is just 1.1 days. The planet is 
so close to its star that its daytime temperature could reach a searing 2300 degrees Celsius.

 

Dr Pollacco is delighted with the results. “SuperWASP is now a planet-finding production line and 
will revolutionise the detection of large planets and our understanding of how they were formed. 
It’s a great triumph for European astronomers.” 

 

FURTHER INFORMATION (INCLUDING IMAGES):

 

SuperWASP 

Project website 

 http://www.superwasp.org < http://www.superwasp.org/> 

 

Images of the SuperWASP Cameras

1)      http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/~dlp/SWASP_1.jpg - a close up of the 8 SuperWASP-North cameras.

2)      http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/~dlp/SWASP_2.jpg - an aerial view of the SuperWASP-North cameras (courtesy of Damon Hart-Davis,  http://d.hd.org/).

3)      http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/~dlp/SWASP_3.jpg - the SuperWASP-South instrument.

 

Image of the Euler (Swiss) Telescope dome

 http://www.cosmograil.org/images/euler-dome.jpg

 

Image of the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute Provence

 http://www.obs-hp.fr/www/guide/sophie/sophie.html

 

RAS National Astronomy Meeting

 http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk

 

RAS home page

 http://www.ras.org.uk

 

NOTES FOR EDITORS

 

The SuperWASP cameras are operated by a consortium including the Isaac Newton Group on La Palma, the Instituto Astrofisica Canarias, the University of Keele, the University of Leicester, the Open University, Queen’s University Belfast and St Andrew’s University.

 

Follow up [observations] of SuperWASP exoplanet candidates are obtained at the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, the Swiss Euler Telescope at La Silla, Chile (in collaboration with colleagues at Geneva Obs