Blogging the UK National Astronomy Meeting 2008
While we heard about the great successes of SuperWASP in discovering ten new planets by watching for small dips in the star’s light caused by the passage of a planet across our line of site to the star, what everyone wants to see is Earth-sized planets being discovered. A new camera installed on the “Liverpool Telescope” hopes to take advantage of a very clever idea to discover these smaller planets around stars where a larger, eclipsing planet has already been discovered.The Liverpool Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands : see person to the left for scale.The RISE camera will carefully measure the timings of transits of the large planets in front of their parent stars. These transits should be completely regular, occurring once per orbit. Any small deviations from this regular pattern could be due to the pull of smaller planets on their larger neighbours, allowing the RISE team to indirectly direct the presence of these smaller planets. Watching the pull of one planet on another is, of course, how Neptune was discovered so this is an old tradition combined with state of the art technology. Let’s hope the RISE team get lucky.