Planet Hunt

A project to search for an Extra-solar Planet using the Liverpool telescope

Artist's impression of a transiting planet. © Lynette Cook

The first discovery of planets outside our own Solar System came just ten years ago, and is currently one of the most exciting areas in astronomy. As of October 2006, astronomers have found 208 extra-solar planets or 'exoplanets' as they are commonly referred to.

A small fraction (well ... 14) of these exoplanets have been discovered because they periodically block out the light from their parent stars as they pass or 'transit' in front of it. A number of teams around the world are currently scouring the night sky for the tell-tale winks of a planetary transit. The UK-based SuperWASP project team has recently announced the discovery of 2 new gas-giant planets, Wasp-1b and Wasp-2b, but they have a number of other candidate targets they want to investigate further with the help of UK schools.

Your task will be to study some of these SuperWASP candidates to determine whether the dips in light they see are due to a planet. Observations for the first of these, phunt001 are now available for analysis. Please submit as many results as you can!

UPDATE (June 2008): The results of the 2006/2007 observing season were discussed with the Superwasp team and they are very keen to see further evidence to confirm their optimism that we may have detected an egress of the planet from a transit. In other words, we need to obtain more data. Sadly the 2007/2008 seasons returned no suitable observations, so we will need to start again in late 2008.

All submissions will be combined with results from schools across the UK to generate a light-curve for the target star. By studying how the brightness changes with time we can gain a better understanding of the object and hopefully discover whether there really is a planet around this candidate star.

Stage 1. Find out more about Exoplanets.

Stage 2. Learn how to measure brightness.

Stage 3. Use data from the telescopes to get your results and submit them to us.

Stage 4. Have a look at the latest results.

Teachers should first read the Notes for Teachers.