Discovering Extrasolar Planets in Your Backyard

RobertFisher writes: "As professional astronomers have continuned to build ever more powerful telescopes, the role of amateur astronomers has diminished substantially, mainly to monitoring variable stars and discovering comets. Now a group of professional astronomers at UC Santa Cruz are beginning an exciting new project, to discover extrasolar planets using a network of amateur astronomers who will monitor candidate stars for transits of extrasolar planets. From their website : '...the past several years have seen the introduction of highly affordable small telescopes equipped with sensitive and stable CCD (charge coupled device) detectors, and controlled by laptop computers. Thousands of amateur astronomers already own observatories which, when properly configured, are capable of reliably detecting the periodic dimming which occurs when a close-in giant planet passes in front of the parent star as seen from Earth.'"

Comments

Interesting project...

[drudd]

Disclaimer: I'm a theorist, so everything I say is probably wrong :)

When I was at Santa Cruz for a graduate prospective visit I heard a talk about this project.

Essentially the idea is you assign amateur astronomers stars to examine (kind of like SETI@Home's work units). They take exposures of the star, and reduce their own data. Each night's work reduces to a single point, essentially the luminosity of the star at that time.

The way you detect transiting planets (or transiting binaries for that matter) is by detecting shifts in luminosity of the star.

The central project then uses the data points from multiple observers over time to detect the transit.

The talk essentially was a proof of concept, they did their own observations, then made monte carlo simulations of observations, including scatter and bad data to try and simulate amateur mistakes. They used this on a known transiting planet and determined that they could detect the planet with this system.

The nice thing about making this a distributed project is that you hopefully gather enough data to survive different places being clouded out, and you don't have to worry about getting telescope time on bigger telescopes until you think you've detected something.

Doug