Observations of the SuperWASP
“The partnership between the two instruments is particularly powerful — SuperWASP finds candidate planets and determines their radii, and SOPHIE confirms their nature and weighs them,” said Dr. Don Pollacco (Queen’s University Belfast), the SuperWASP Project Scientist.
When an exoplanet has the temperature of more than 1,700 degrees Celsius and has the potential to put stringent constraints on exoplanet atmospheric models, problems may be occurring. The announcement of collaboration between WASP and SOPHIE has brought about such a problem with the discovery of WASP-3b, one of the hottest exoplanets yet to be found.
Both powerful systems, SuperWASP itself consists of the UK’s leading extra-solar planet detection program with eight academic institutions–Cambridge University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes, Keele University, Leicester University, the Open University, Queen’s University Belfast and St. Andrew’s University. With two robotic observatories operating all year and covering both hemispheres of the sky for the SuperWASP, one is located on the island of La Palma with the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes (ING), and the other is located at the site of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). Both observatories consist of eight wide-angle cameras, simultaneously watching the sky of planetary transit events—such as the WASP-3b.
The WASP-3b was initially discovered by the SuperWASP-North. The WASP-3b findings were confirmed by theIAC80 telescope in Izana Observatory, Tenerife, which was part of the Canarian Observatories’ International Time Program for 2007, along with the University of Keele 60-cm telescope. Confirmed with the radial velocity method, it was obtained with the SOPHIE spectrograph.
Known as a transit, the SuperWASP team is repeatedly looking for tiny dips in the starlight that is caused when a planet passes in front of its star. With the French and Swiss users of SOPHIE, a detection was found of a slight wobble in each star’s motion as the planets orbited them. Of the hundreds of thousands of stars that the SuperWASP telescopes observes, only a dozen or so of the known systems has a planet been observed to pass in front of its star. Yet when found, they hold the key to the formation of planetary systems, and assists in the understanding of our origin on Earth. Of all the planets in the universe, they are the only planets whose sizes and densities are determined in a reliable manner.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
