Planet Discovered Using Telephoto Camera Lenses

[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."

Comments

Real ingenuity

[bcmm]

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.

Re:Real ingenuity

[pimpimpim]

A lot of "amateurs" actually do work that is too much of a hassle for current science. E.g. mineralogy is mainly done by amateurs these days.

I think this current news item is very good for everyone, it shows that technology (and the abbility to develop software easily and freely) actually will help to "democratize" science, making it possible for less rich groups (e.g. in developing countries, or just groups of interested amateurs) to make refreshing contributions to science! This is a good thing, as science tends to move away from the general public, getting more complicated and requiring more investments in precize equipement by the day.

my only concern is if peer reviews take place in this 'amateur' science. As all scientists, everyone wants to have a big discovery, and there is a big need to check on this if no-one tries to claim success before thorougly checking it. This urge will be no worse, no less than in "real science", but I'm just not sure if there has or will be done any checking of the results in this case. Will they publish this (I read the article half, didn't see a mention of it).

Re:Real ingenuity

[TapeCutter]

Amature astronomers often contribute to science but are not always interested in the formalities of academia, just the fact that a technique _seems_ to work is enough for post grads to take notice and give it a try. The two groups have a long history of complementing each other.

Most "amatures" seem to use the technology to "smell the roses", making images that rival the hubble in beauty. There is nothing really scientific about the images themselves, but then again the "blue marble" wasn't really all that scientific either.

Re:Real ingenuity

[Shigeru]

I don't mean to diminish the cleverness of those involved in this project at all, but the article summary is a little misleading. While the discovery was made with very small-scale telescopes, the confirmation that this was actually a planet came from two large telescopes, the Harlan J. Smith Telescope (2.7 meter aperture) and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (9.2 meter effective aperture), as the linked article mentions.

Finding extrasolar planets by the transit method, where you moniter large fields of stars and look for brightness variations as a planet passes in front of one of your targets and blocks some light, is pretty straight-forward. You tend to only need somewhere between 0.1% and 1% precision in your photometry, which requires some work to achieve, but is by no means prohibitive. So it's a good technique for amateurs to get involved with, especially when you consider that smaller telescopes tend to have larger fields of view, so you can moniter more stars at once. But the main stumbling block transit-searchers have run into is the false positive rate. The biggest surveys have found a huge false-positive rate (90-95%) among the planet candidates. It turns out there are lots of things that can make a star dim at fixed intervals, from grazing binaries to starspots.

As a result, transit planet candidates are only considered confirmed when there are measurements of a radial-velocity wobble consistent with the orbital period found by the transit. To get the radial velocity precision you need (for the Hot Jupiters transits detect, precision of tens of meters per second is sufficient), it takes a precise, high resolution spectrograph (very expensive), mounted on a large telescope (at least a couple meters).

I should also point out that transit searches are sensitive mainly to close-in planets. The sensitivity function drops very quickly as the planet moves further out (both because you need a longer sustained campaign, and because the chances of the planet's orbit crossing the star decreases). All the transit detections thus far have been from planets with several-day orbits. While this is interesting science, there's a lot of work to be done with planets in other regimes. The straight-up radial velocity technique gets you planets at seperations between 0 and 5 AU or so (over 150 planets found this way so far), the microlensing method can also detect planets at much larger orbital separations (2 or 3 planets up until now), and direct imaging is ideally suited for large-seperation planets (only the 1 good planet at this point). My point is that you can't cover this whole range of parameter space with small telescopes alone. Radial velocity and direct imaging require large investments in hardware, both in the large telescope itself and the instrumentation (disclaimer: I work on direct imaging, that's why I keep bringing it up). It's also important to note that one of the reasons people find transiting planets so interesting is the possibility of getting spectral information out of the planets. NASA's Spitzer space telescope recently detected the secondary eclipse (the loss of light when the planet is hidden behind the star) of two transiting extrasolar planets. This is pretty exciting science, since you can really compare data to models this way, but it requires some extensive telescope set-ups to get it done.

So again, this is certainly a great project for getting amateurs involved in the planet-finding game, and I"m very impressed with this result. But don't close down Keck and the VLT and Hubble just yet; there's a lot of work to be done in extrasolar planet research, and much of it requires large telescopes with new (read: expensive) instruments.

Re:Real ingenuity

[doubletruncation]

Actually they need to use small telescopes for this kind of project simply because large telescopes won't work. Only 1% of Sun-like stars will have a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting with a period less than ~10 days, and only 10% of these will transit from our point of view. So they need to look at ~1000 sun-like stars to have a chance of getting a single transiting hot jupiter. They're particularly interesting in finding these planets around bright stars since then you can hope to do interesting follow-up like measuring their atmospheres and reflected light. The point is, that to have any chance of finding such a planet around a bright star they need to look at very large fields of view - typically for these kind of surveys a single image will be 5 to 10 degrees on a side (which is 10 to 20 times the diameter of the full moon). It's incredibly difficult to get a very large field of view with a big telescope (for a 6 meter telescope the largest field of view camera that has been built covers half a degree by half a degree), so for this type of project small, cheap, off-the-wall telescopes are the best tools for the job. There are, in fact, a number of similar surveys using small telescopes to look for these things, and a planet (Tres-1) has already been found this way.

Planet using telephoto lens

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is a planet using a telephoto lens for?
Spying on uranus?

Correct Link

[timgoh0]

The second link in the article appears to be pointing to the wrong place. The correct link should be this

Re:Good news everyone!

[cnettel]

Note that we don't see the planet. We see that we see less of the light from the star. If the planet would be Earth-like (or a reasonably dense gas giant), we wouldn't get any absorption spectra clues for the chemical composition, as all wavelengths would be absorbed in the "eclipsed" region of the star's disc.

Tight Orbit

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

This Jupiter-like planet appears to be a pretty weird case. An orbit lasts 4 days, an object as large as that with an orbit as short as that must be relatively easy to discover. I suppose the thing will not be around much longer anyway - it will impact the sun there.

Re:Tight Orbit

[hde226868]

There is no danger in the planet impacting on the star. For this you would have to invoke some mechanism that is able to get rid of the planet's orbital angular momentum, which is very difficult to acheive. So, while the planet is close to its star, it is in no danger of falling in - only very much in the future once the star leaves the main sequence and becomes a red giant. But that's some billion years in the future... (as an aside, a similar misconception is that if a star suddenly turns supernova and becomes a black hole, many people believe that planets surrounding that star would get "sucked in". For the same reason, that's not a problem either). Note that Mercury in our solar system has an 88d orbit, and has happily lived there for 4.5 billion years.

What is more worrisome is that the planet gets heated up due to its proximity to the star and is evaporated. But again, planets have an awful amount of mass, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem either. For example, there is a 4.4 jupiter masses planet around Tau Bootis, in a 3.3d orbit (http://www.exoplaneten.de/tauboo/english.html), but the general estimate for objects of this kind (dubbed "hot jupiters") is that they will survive for billions of years. The reason for this is that the mass loss rate caused by the proximity of the star is still negligible compared to the mass of the planet. Take a look at the article by Ferlet et al., on p. 226 of a recent conference on explanets, the proceedings of which are at http://www.obs-hp.fr/www/pubs/Coll51Peg/proceeding s.html.

Re:Uranus jokes are LAME!

[Frogbert]

They should rename that planet to put those annoying jokes to bed once and for all. I'd like to suggest Urectum.

Not That Easy

[Rob Carr]

f that's what we can do now with such modest optics, I imagine it won't take much more than a decade or two before we're able to detect the signature of life in some extra-solar planet out there.

There's an upper limit on what can be seen from Earth's surface. Alas, we will need space-based telescopes to find other Earths. I suppose we could find Jupiter-sized planets with lifesigns on them. Given that terrestrial life might have needed a solid surface to evolve on, I'm not sure how likely that is. Then again, it's a big galaxy, and even the weird and unlikely has to happen someplace.

Re:Uranus jokes are LAME!

[RasputinAXP]

I'm sure they'll get around to it by, oh...say..2620?

Let's hope this doesn't turn into Nikon vs. Canon!

[Glytch]

Very cool project. I've heard of amateur astrophotographers using fast lenses, but this takes it to a whole new level. The lenses used in this telescope (Canon's 200mm f/1.8 L lens) not only collect an enormous amount of light, but are also among the highest quality lenses ever made.

Don't need a telephoto at all

[gurutc]

To show my folks how good their middle of the line $300 Fuji 5200 camera was I set it on the roof of my car and did a high resolution .5 second exposure of Jupiter. Then I took the cam inside, loaded the pic on the pc, and zoomed it in to show them the moons of Jupiter and some of the cloud colors on Jupiter itself.

The Canon EF 200mm F2.8 L II triumphs again

[heroine]

Those 200mm lenses are truly underappreciated masterpieces. They are so over engineered, they can exceed telescopes for most wide field astronomy. Unlike most telescopes of equivalent quality, the EF 200mm is portable.

As time progresses and more people can afford digital SLR's, the EF 200mm F2.8 L II is going to make a lot of astonomical discoveries.