By Xinhua
Washington : An international team of astronomers has found 10 new extra-solar planets, planets that orbit stars other than our sun, University of California, Santa Barbara, announced on Tuesday.
The new international collaboration is called “SuperWASP,” for Wide Area Search for Planets. In the last six months the SuperWASP team has used two batteries of cameras, one in Spain’s Canary Islands and one in South Africa, to discover the 10 new extra solar planets.
Two participating astronomers from the U.S. are Rachel Street and Tim Lister, who are working at the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN), affiliated with UCSB.
“The flood of new discoveries from SuperWASP will revolutionize our understanding of how planets form,” said Lister in the statement released by UCSB.
In order to discover these planets, astronomers look for “transits,” moments when the planets pass in front of the star, like an eclipse, as viewed from the Earth. This technique of locating the planets gives more information about the formation and evolution of the planets than the gravitational technique.
With the gravitational technique, scientists have discovered around 270 extra solar planets since the early 1990s. They measured the gravitational pull on the star that is exerted by the orbiting planet. As the planet moves, it 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, so the pace of discovery is slow.
The SuperWASP technique involves two sets of cameras to watch for events known as transits. The SuperWASP cameras work as robots, surveying a large area of the sky at once. Each night astronomers receive data from millions of stars. They can then check for transits and hence planets. The transit technique also allows scientists to deduce the size and mass of each planet.
A team of collaborators around the world follows up each possible planet found by SuperWASP with more detailed observations to confirm or reject the discovery.
Since they started operation in 2004, the Super WASP cameras have found 15 planets that transit their stars, making it the most successful transit survey in the world.