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.

From authors Eric Saunders, Tim Naylor & Alasdair Allan, the poster ‘An Autonomous Adaptive Scheduling Agent for Period Searching’ is listed as part of the ‘Current facilities and new instruments’ session.

Abstract: What is the best way to practically observe undersampled, periodic, time-varying phenomena using a network of robotic telescopes? We implement an autonomous software agent that uses an optimal geometric sampling technique to cover the period range of interest, but additionally implements proactive behaviour that maximises the optimality of the dataset in the face of an uncertain and changing operating environment. The agent has been successfully demonstrated using the three 2m robotic Faulkes North, Faulkes South, and Liverpool Telescopes.

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