Searching For A Thousand New Worlds

The WASP system is unique in several ways. It is composed primarily of commercially available astronomical gear under robotic control. Pete Wheatley, University of Leicester notes, “The first camera will generate 30 Gigabytes of data per night (equivalent to roughly 40 CDs!) and the entire network, once completed, should produce 16,000 Gigabytes a year, giving us a colossal processing task.” WASP should see first light in the summer of 2003. La Palma is a premier site for astronomy in the Canary Islands.

Other extrasolar planets have recently been examined by non-optical methods. Orbiting around neutron stars that are acting as pulsars, these planets are so blasted by radiation they have no hope of supporting life. By measuring changes the planets make in radio signals given off by the pulsar named PSR 1257+12, scientists have been able to measure planets orbiting that dead star with amazing precision. One planet is 4.5 times the size of Earth; another is only 3 times as heavy. “We know absolutely for sure that these are Earth-sized planets,” astronomer Maciej Konacki said. A third planet around the pulsar is measured as being smaller than Earth, only twice the size of the Moon. These planets are much smaller than the so-called “hot-Jupiters” being discovered by optical methods used by WASP and by the spectrographic methods which have resulted in the discovery of most other extrasolar planets.

And to end this topic by shifting the emphasis from the planets to the stars – as noted above, a pulsar is a rotating neutron star, which in turn is a star that tried to become a black hole but didn’t make it because it wasn’t “fat” enough. A really interesting article published this week that I ran across on black holes is here.