| OU helps discover new planets |
| Written by News Desk | |
| Wednesday, 09 April 2008 | |
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The Open University in Milton Keynes has played a key role in the discovery of 10 new planets in orbit around other stars. The OU was part of an international team of astronomers who used two batteries of cameras – one in the Canary Islands and one in South Africa – to discover the ‘extrasolar’ planets under the Wide Area Search for Planets (SuperWASP) consortium. SuperWASP uses two sets of cameras, which work as robots, to watch for events known as transits, where a planet passes directly in front of a star and blocks out some of the star’s light, so from the Earth the star temporarily appears a little fainter. Astronomers at The Open University have been key players in the SuperWASP consortium since its inception, providing funding and person-power to get the project started. They continue to play leading roles in the ongoing detection of extrasolar planets and their characterisation. Each possible planet found using SuperWASP is then observed by astronomers working at the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, the Swiss Euler Telescope in Chile and the Observatoire de Haute Provence in southern France, who use precision instruments to confirm or reject the discovery.
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