• Question: Did you hear about the boy in England who found a planet while do work experience at Keele University. How easy is it to find a new planet ?

    Asked by 555thuc44 to Ryan on 13 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Ryan Cheale

      Ryan Cheale answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      i don’t look at planets so I had to look this up! Basically he was using data from Wide Angle Search for Planets project (WASP).

      Now the type of planet this lad found was jupiter sized and had a very quick orbit around its host star. So when a planet is in front of a star from out perspective the light is blocked out so if i made a graph of the light received from this star over time there would be dips in the data where a planet has blocked out the light.

      Larger planets – easier to spot big dips
      Small planets – harder to spot small dips

      Now how easy is it? Not so sure on that, but with huge databases coming in from these sort of projects more and more exoplanets will be found (There are billions of them out there). If you’re interested try and get involved, you could be finding one yourself! (I’ll take partial credit)

Comments