Planet Hunt
SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets)
The SuperWASP project is the UK's leading extra-solar planet detection program and is staffed by astronomers from six diferent UK universities. SuperWASP consists of two small robotic telescopes, one (SuperWASP-North) not far from the Liverpool Telescope on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and the other (SuperWASP-South) located in a remote part of South Africa.
Image of the SuperwWASP telescope in the Canary Islands. © WASP
The telescopes are near-identical and consist of 8 cameras that scan large areas of the night sky for planetary transit events. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its parent star and blocks out some of the light coming from it. The SuperWasp cameras continuously monitor many thousands of stars to see if they can detect the tell-tale flicker due to a planet. After several years of development, the two telescopes were both fully operational for the 2006 obseving season and have recently (Sep 2006) found their first two planets, Wasp-1b and Wasp-2b. These newly discovered worlds appear to be gas-giant planets (like Jupiter but much hotter) that orbit their parent stars once every couple of days.
The project is one of the major players in the world of extra-solar planet detection and has kindly allowed schools registered with the National Schools Observatory to take part in it's cutting-edge research.
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