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 | | Aerial view of the SuperWASP-North cameras |
In the last six months an international team working on the the Wide Area Search for Planets project (SuperWASP) has discovered the planets using cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa. They are known as extrasolar planets as they orbit around other stars.Team member Dr Don Pollacco from the Astrophysics Research Centre in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s said: “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.” Scientists have found more than 270 extrasolar planets since the first one was discovered in the early 1990s. But making these discoveries has depended on looking at each star over a period of weeks or months so the pace of discovery is fairly slow and it gives very little information about the planets. 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 its light, so from the earth the star temporarily appears a little fainter. The cameras work as robots, surveying a large area of the sky at once. Each night astronomers have data from millions of stars that they can check for transits. The transit method also allows scientists to deduce the size and mass of each planet. Forty five planets have now been discovered using the transit method, and since they were set up in 2004 the SuperWASP cameras have found 15 of them - making them the most successful discovery instruments in the world.
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