Hunt for Exoplanets Draws Russian Telescope, Too

According to an announcement made by Russian officials, the Pulkovo Observatory will soon join the international hunt for extrasolar planets around distant stars. This installation is one of the largest and most complex Russian telescopes ever built, and is located on Pulkovo Heights, near Saint Petersburg.

The announcement was made by Lev Zelyony, who is the head of the Russian Institute for Space Research. He believes that the nation is lagging behind other countries in one of the most important areas of research in astronomy today.

He told the Russian news agency Ria Novosti that the team planned to use ground-based telescopes to detect exoplanets via the transit method. This means that the observatory will be fixed on a star, and astronomers will wait for the object's brightness curve to exhibit a small dip.

This usually happens when an exoplanets passes between the planet and the telescope. If the dip is observed three times, and occurs at the same interval, then the planetary object is confirmed. Another telescope is then used to carry out the same observations, just to make sure.

The United States have been leading the way in exoplanetary research, primarily through the NASA Kepler Telescope, which was developed specifically for tracking down such objects in a relatively small area of the Milky Way.

Thus far, Kepler managed to identify 2,300+ planetary candidates, and scientists estimate that at least 80 percent of these proposals will eventually be confirmed. Now that this approach proved so successful, Russia wants to enter this field of science as well.

“Scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory are planning to use ground-based instruments to study the transit of planets around their parent stars,” Zelyony told RIA Novosti in Moscow, according to Universe Today.

The official cited the example of the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet), an installation that managed to discover 29 of the 750+ confirmed exoplanets found thus far.

With its three refractor telescopes, an astrophysical laboratory, one radio telescope and an interferometer, among others, the Pulkovo Observatory is well fit for exoplanetary scans.

“It is an interesting research, which should be pursued. It will also help us look at our Solar System from a different perspective,” Zelyony concluded.