4-inch Telescope Finds New Planet

serutan writes "After a backyard astronomy size telescope first tracked the periodic dimming of a star 500 light-years away, the Keck I telescope in Hawaii later confirmed that a Jupiter-size planet orbits the star. A press release from Harvard gives details. This is the first result of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, a project using small telescopes and cheap equipment to search for extrasolar planets. "

Comments

Re:Not the telescope

[cephyn]

Well yeah, but Galileo found the moons of jupiter too, not his telescope. the telescope has no analytical properties, it takes an analyzer to do that (whether that be software or human brain wetware). The information analyzed by the software came from a "small" telescope, so you're nitpicking and being disingenuous. Everyone knows the telescope doesn't deserve congratulations, the people who designed the software do. I bet if you ask them how they found this planet, they'll say "well we started with a telescope of 4 inches, and THEN fed the information into a computer...." -- so technically, the telescope saw the planet first. ;)

So much for Big Science

[Baldrson]

The International Linear Collider is the antithesis of this sort of discovery. There are opportunities all over the place for small science to make big discoveries but small science is far less likely to do so if big science is sucking up all the equipment and man hours.

There needs to be a lot more prizes awarded to amateur scientists for discoveries and fewer big science projects.

Re:So much for Big Science

[Shigeru]

It should be noted that while the initial discovery made with a 10 cm telescope set up relatively cheaply, the confirmation that it was in fact a planet came using the multi-million dollar Keck telescope. Transit detections have a notoriously bad record for turning out to be planets (a few percent are actually confirmed, the rest are some other effect), so you need follow-up with high resolution spectra. And for an 11th magnitude star, that requires a large telescope like Keck.

They could have gotten away with a 3-meter like at Lick Observatory, in this case, given the large radial velocity amplitude, but for further-out planets Keck is the only way to go. Trying to do this part of the science with more 10 cm telescopes would be out of the question.