14 DAY TRIAL // The Wide Area Search for Planets international collaboration announced that it had found 10 new extra solar planets, by using of robotic camera systems, which survey solar systems other than our own, in the hope of understanding how planets are formed around stars. Astronomers are expected to detail their findings today at the Royal Astronomical Society's national Astronomy meeting.
The robotic cameras use a detection technique relying on the transit of the planet through the front of the star, thus partially eclipsing it from our point of view. Alternative techniques use gravity to detect planets, however most of the found bodies are gas giants and the techniques doesn't reveal enough information regarding the planet, except for its mass and orbit radius.
During the last six months of study, the SuperWASP collaboration, including researchers from University of California, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and Queen's University, discovered, with the help of two of its cameras, ten new other exo-planets. Since the discovery of the first exo-planet back in 1996, more than 270 other planets have been found with the help of the gravitational technique.
The gravitational technique involves measuring the gravitational wobble inflicted by the planet, as it orbits its parent star. Observations with the help of this technique may take weeks or months at a time and the discovery rate is very low. The transit technique, on the other hand, relies of the fact that the star may pass through the front of its parent star from time to time, thus blocking out some of the light coming our way.
A slight fainting of the light brightness of a star could suggest that a planet orbits it. The SuperWASP, with its two cameras, is able to monitor several millions of stars each night, to check whether there is a change in the brightness of the star. A researching team then studies the potential discoveries in detail, in order to establish whether it is valid.
Using the transit technique, 46 planets have been found throughout our galaxy, out of which 15 where discovered by the SuperWASP, making it the most successful exo-planet survey ever.
Planets discovered by the SuperWASP collaboration have masses ranging between one half of Jupiter and eight times larger than Jupiter. WASP-12b for example, is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in less than an Earth day and experiences temperatures up to 2300 degrees Celsius.
"The flood of new discoveries from SuperWASP will revolutionize our understanding of how planets form. LCOGTN's flexible global network of telescope is an indispensable part of the worldwide effort to learn about the new planets," said Tim Lister from the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.