Exoplanet hunt a success for amateur astronomers
A hot Jupiter has been discovered using amateur images for the first time
Over recent years there has been a growing trend for amateur astronomers becoming involved in ‘professional’ research, including the rapidly emerging field of exoplanet discovery. This has included Chris Lintott’s own Zooniverse projects, such as Planet Hunters and Exoplanet Explorers. Many of these projects, however, have focused on the search for planets in data sets already created by professional astronomers. Now, Artem Burdanov at the Space sciences, Technologies and Astrophysics Research (STAR) Institute in the University of Liège, Belgium, and his colleagues report on an exciting new initiative for amateur astronomers discovering new exoplanets from their own images, using readily available and relatively affordable equipment.
The Kourovka Planet Search (KPS) project uses wide-field telescopic images gathered by an amateur astronomer and searches for previously unknown exoplanets using the transit method (whereby an orbiting exoplanet is detected by the periodic dimming of the starlight as it passes across the disc of its sun as seen from our perspective). And KPS has now discovered its first new exoplanet, KPS-1b. This world is a ‘hot Jupiter’, almost exactly the same mass and diameter as Jupiter but in a very close orbit of only 1.7 days around its K1-type star. This new exoplanet has now been characterised by follow-up observations with larger telescopes.
What’s particularly interesting about this result is that the survey is focusing on a region most professional exoplanet searches deliberately avoid – the galactic plane. While the plane has a huge number of stars to observe, the area presents several problems for detecting exoplanets unless the telescope system has a high enough spatial resolution. The star-crowded region of the galactic plane can make spotting transiting planets harder because the blending of light from several stars can dilute the brightness-dip signal from a planet around one of them, and eclipsing binary stars can also trigger lots of false-alarm detections.
The KPS project, however, has been specifically designed to offer not only a wide-field, but also a significantly higher spatial resolution than even
“Although hot Jupiters are relatively rare they offer attractive targets for ground-based planethunting efforts”
several professional surveys. All this means that this amateur effort is able to discover hot Jupiters lurking within the galactic plane that other observing activities can’t. Although hot Jupiters are relatively rare – they exist around only about 1 per cent of the stars in the solar neighbourhood – they offer attractive targets for ground-based planet-hunting efforts. Hot Jupiters are much more likely to transit as they orbit so closely to their sun; their short orbital period maximises the number of starlight dips that are needed for a confident detection; and their large size gives a more conspicuous transit signal (they block more of their star’s light) for measuring with ground-based telescopes.
Now the astronomers involved are building on the success of KPS, applying the lessons they’ve learned to launch the Galactic Plane eXoplanet (GPX) survey. They aim to gather around 150 hours of data from many stars over a three-month period, all targeting the largely overlooked region of the sky along the galactic plane. This certainly is a thrilling time for ground-breaking amateur astronomy!
LEWIS DARTNELL was reading… KPS 1-B – The first transiting exoplanet discovered using an amateur wide-field CCD data by Artem Burdanov et al Read it online at https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05551