British Astronomers Discover 3 New Exo-Planets With Help from eBay

A British-led team of scientists have discovered three planets which are hotter and heavier than Jupiter, but with a little bit of help from internet auction site eBay.

The planets, named Wasp-3b, Wasp-4b and Wasp-5b, were found by a team led by astronomers from St Andrews University in Fife -part of SuperWASP, the UK's leading extra-solar planet detection program comprising of a consortium of eight academic institutions

The team used a powerful instrument fitted with 16 cameras to produce the new images but as they assembled the equipment they discovered that they were 13 lenses short and that the camera's manufacturer had discontinued the product.

Luckily the scientists were able to track down the crucial £4000 lenses from a dealer in South Korea by looking on eBay.

SuperWASP consists of two robotic observatories that operate continuously all year around, allowing them to cover both hemispheres of the sky.

WASP-4 and WASP-5 are the first planets discovered by the WASP project's cameras in South Africa, and were confirmed by a collaboration with Swiss and French astronomers. “These two are now the brightest transiting planets in the Southern hemisphere” said Dr Hellier. WASP-3 is the third planet that the team has found in the North, using the SuperWASP camera sited in the Canary Islands. Dr Don Pollacco, of Queen's University Belfast, said “We are the only team to have found transiting planets in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres; for the first time we have both SuperWASP cameras running, giving complete coverage of the whole sky”.

Exoplanet expert, Professor Andrew Cameron, of St. Andrews University, comments "All three planets are similar to Jupiter, but are orbiting their stars so closely that their `year' lasts less than two days. These are among the shortest orbital periods yet discovered''. Being so close to their star the surface temperatures of the planets will be more than 2000 degrees Celsius, so it is unlikely that life as we know it could survive there.

The finding of Jupiter-mass planets around other stars supports the idea that there are also many Earth-sized planets waiting to be discovered as astronomers' technology improves.

The team conducted huge "mosaic sweeps" of the sky at night, capturing images of millions of stars.
The data was then analysed at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France.

The three 'wasps' were located using specialist cameras in La Palma in the Canary Islands and Sutherland in South Africa.The first, SuperWASP-North is located on the island of La Palma amongst the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes (ING). The second, SuperWASP-South is located at the site of the South African Astronomical Observatory.

The observatories each consist of eight wide-angle cameras that simultaneously monitor the sky for planetary transit events. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its parent star temporarily blocking some of the light from it . The eight wide-angle cameras allows the SuperWASP teams to monitor millions of stars simultaneously enabling them to detect the rare transit events.

The SuperWASP consortium includes 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.

Posted by Casey Kazan.