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4-inch Telescope Finds New Planet

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the because-you-can dept.

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. "

10 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Smaller Planets? by Tango42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will this method help find smaller planets? Jovian sized are all well and good, but Terrestrial would be more interesting.

    1. Re:Smaller Planets? by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Will this method help find smaller planets?

      I doubt it. Terrestrial planets wouldn't block enough of a star's light to make a noticable difference. Consider that the Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter and Sol about 865,000. That's roughly 108 times the diameter and the area (what's important here) is proportional to the square of the diameter making Sol's area on the order of 11664 times that of the Earth. Even with Jovian planets, the area covered is small, but apparently not too small.

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  2. Or.. by essreenim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You could read this link to a more intersting story I tried to submit that was rejected. (Flamebait modding unnecessary - just mentioning)
    Here =======} *

  3. Very close by Tango42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Very close by cephyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Anything that size is a gas giant. I mean i guess a rocky planet would be possible, but i somehow doubt it as well. It just seems that something bad would happen...it would probably have to be some sort of weird molten ball of magma....and it would be gathering all kinds of gas around it too due to its massive gravity, so I guess it would still be a gas giant. This is what i get for thinking as I type.

      The hydrogen would only be captured by the star if the gravity of the planet was too weak to hold the hydrogen, or the gravity at the planet's "surface" or whatnot was weaker than the gravity exerted at that surface by the star. Which is rather unlikely...sure its real close to the star but its a real big planet too.

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  4. Some NASA dude by A55M0NKEY · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I accompanied my Dad to the Stellafane the weekend before last where some NASA dude talked about how amateur astronomers with small telescopes 6-12 inches might collect useful data on planets partially eclipsing ( transiting ) stars by measuring and graphing the brightness of the star using a CCD.

    I am not really into astronomy, but I wonder if one of those guys found it..

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  5. Re:Amateur Astronomy by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Hmmm by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    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.

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  7. I am more intrigued by the speed... by Zaphrod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. A ground based telescope... by Kaldaien · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ;)