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Planet Discovered Using Telephoto Camera Lenses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shot-in-the-dark dept.

[rvr] writes "The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) reports the discovery of an extra-solar planet called XO-1b, which orbits a dim star in Corona Borealis every 4 days. To find it, the brightness of several thousand stars were regularly scanned using two mini-telescopes in Hawaii. This equipment was built using commercial hardware: two digital cameras, attached to telephoto camera lenses on a robotic equatorial mount. A team of amateur astronomers helped with their own equipment to discard or confirm dozens of suspected transits."

2 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Real ingenuity by bcmm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's real ingenuity and intelligence: not throwing money at getting incredible machines to do things for you, but working out what you can do with off-the-shelf stuff and designing a system around it. People have already spent a lot on big telescopes for extrasolar planet hunting.

    --
    # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  2. From the article text by TrixX · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The transit method allows astronomers to determine a planet's mass and size. Astronomers use this information to deduce the planet's characteristics, such as its density.

    They infer the density from the mass and size! I knew those astronomers were really damn smart!

    (I'm not laughing at the astronomers. I am laughing at the silly article writers that praise the trivial part of the astronomer work instead of the really interesting things that the astronomers do).