COROT launched successfully
The launch of COROT is excellent news, but the work is only just beginning for the team behind what will be the first of several planet-hunting missions. The hard bit is extracting the tiny signal which represents the transit of a Earth across the face of a star from the huge mass of data. COROT’s chosen tactic is to stick to one field for 150 days and then move on, and obviously being in space will also help with removing many sources of interference that affect ground-based searches. I hope they’re successful, but we’ve had an excellent warning as to how hard this is.
I was really pleased we featured SuperWASP on the Sky at Night - it seemed an excellent example of a rapidly put together, cheap, experiment based on a simple but brilliant idea (in this case, using camera lenses and top-quality cameras to survey the whole sky). At the time (2004, if memory serves) I expected it to produce a plethora of planet discoveries, but two years on and we’re only just reporting on the first two. I don’t mean to disparage their efforts, but it’s certainly surprised me how difficult this is. Let’s see how COROT gets on.
(More on this in my state of the Universe report coming up before New Year).
on January 1st, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Happy New Year 2007
mark_smith
on August 7th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
[...] I’ve mentioned before just how difficult it is to find extrasolar planets. I’ve also made little secret of the fact that I’m a huge fan of the SuperWASP experiment which adds lenses to professional standard CCD cameras, essentially getting rid of the telescope in order to monitor a huge area of sky for faint dips in the light coming from a star which might indicate the passage of a planet in front of it. The technique works well - one of the leading teams announced the discovery of the largest known planet this way yesterday. (Largest - not most massive. That had me confused for a bit). [...]