(PLANETQUEST) -- A team of planet-hunters based in the United Kingdom has announced the discovery of three new exoplanets. The astronomers, who are part of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project, observed the distant planets as they orbited in front of their host stars, a phenomenon known as transiting.
"When we see a transit we can deduce the size and mass of the planet and also what it is made of, so we can use these planets to study how solar systems form," said team member Dr. Coel Hellier of Keele University. Astronomers can detect transiting planets by monitoring the dip in a star's light when a planet passes in front of it. The amount of the light change and the frequency with which it happens can tell scientists how big a planet is and how quickly it orbits the star.
WASP-4 and WASP-5 are the first planets discovered by the WASP project's cameras in South Africa, and were confirmed by a collaboration with Swiss and French astronomers. "These two are now the brightest transiting planets in the Southern hemisphere" Hellier said. WASP-3 is the third planet that the team has found in the North, using the SuperWASP camera sited in the Canary Islands. "We are the only team to have found transiting planets in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres," said Dr. Don Pollacco, of Queen's University Belfast. "For the first time we have both SuperWASP cameras running, giving complete coverage of the whole sky".
All three planets are similar to Jupiter, but are orbiting their stars so closely that their "year" lasts less than two days, said exoplanet expert Andrew Cameron, of St. Andrews University. "These are among the shortest orbital periods yet discovered,'' Cameron said.
Being so close to their star the surface temperatures of the planets will be more than 2,000 degrees Celsius, so it is unlikely that life as we know it could survive there. Still, astronomers hope that the presence of many large planets indicates that there are many smaller, more Earth-like ones waiting to be discovered. The new findings bring the total number of exoplanets discovered so far to 264.
The WASP project is a consortium of U.K. universities engaged in a search for large exoplanets. The discoveries were announced this week at a conference in China.
Source: Superwasp.org
