Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Will this method help find smaller planets? Jovian sized are all well and good, but Terrestrial would be more interesting.
I find it hard to believe that the dimming was detected with such a small resolution. I'd have to look into this. If it were possible to detect exoplanets with backyard telescopes then shouldn't have they been discovered 2 decades ago? We knew that dimming was indicative of an exoplanet back then.
You could read this link to a more intersting story I tried to submit that was rejected. (Flamebait modding unnecessary - just mentioning)
Here =======} *
The newfound planet is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star located about 500 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Lyra. This world circles its star every 3.03 days at a distance of only 4 million miles, much closer and faster than the planet Mercury in our solar system, giving it a temperature of around 1500 degrees F. That's very close... wouldn't the Hydrogen be captured by the star? A jupiter sized rocky planet sounds unlikely. Unless it's a very small star, I guess...
And, in fact, it's misleading to put it down to one telescope - yes one first saw it, but "the team at the CfA used a network of small telescopes" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/25/planet_fou nd/
I am not really into astronomy, but I wonder if one of those guys found it..
Eat at Joe's.
This is actually a group of PhD's running some advanced data collection and aggregation software on a beowulf cluster of small telescopes.
This isnt, as the slashdot blurb suggests, some weekend warrior on his back porch who discovered a new planet.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Again?
Am I the only one beginning to feel a little skepticism about some of these claims? They keep finding giant planets closer to stars than Mercury, which seems to fly in the face of many previously established theories of planetary system formation.
Yeah, maybe this is new info that modifies the older theories, and maybe this is the way things are but something just seems wrong here. They keep finding this situation of Jupiter sized (or larger) worlds hugging their parent stars. Could there be some other mechanism at work?
One other idea is that this is simply the sitation we are able to detect with current methods (dimming and wobble), but, geez, there's so many of them like this. My Spidey-sense has begun to tingle.
--- Ban humanity.
granted, but most scopes make it easy to take multiple pics (most amateur astronomy pics on the web are multiple stacked pics). All you really need, then, is the software. I'm sure this research is good enough to either let the code out, or some bored astronomer coders will come up with something similar.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I am more intrigued by the speed of the planet. The Earth moves around the sun at about 66,000 miles per hour where this planet must move at almost 800,000 miles per hour.
Most interesting of all is that this new planet discovered optically was done by a ground based telescope. With the distortion from our atmosphere I'd have thought ground based optical exploration to be impractical. Most planets discovered outside of our solar system have been done with Spectroscopy and Interferometry. Hubble's had only limited success finding a planet optically. To find a planet with such a relatively inexpensive ground based optical telescope must be a major blow to NASA's ego ;)
The advantage to small telescopes is the ability to stare at a large section of the sky at once (in the case of the 10-cm telescopes used for this project, each exposure covers 6 degrees of sky). Compare this to the 10-meter Keck telescopes, whose imaging systems have fields of view of about an arcminute (1/60th of a degree). For transit searches, you want to keep staring at a star until you get lucky with a planet passing in front of the star, then confirm that as the transit happens again and again. So your best bet for optimizing your transit search is to look at a lot of stars at once, meaning a big field of view, which you get most easily from small telescopes.
It's not impossible to get large fields of view with large telescopes, but it takes a lot more effort. Check out the plans for building the 8.4 meter LSST for details.
Once this new software package is installed and the scope hooked up, how much effort do these searches take, and how smart do the searchers have to be?
I am SO guessing on this, but there can't be that many super smart astronomer types out there and it may be a waste to have them on less than awesome machines. Can a non-moron, non-specialist handle the datagathering and analysis with this package? I'm mostly just curious about this.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.