Chris Lintott’s Universe

Excellent news! I’ve written before about SuperWASP’s planet search, and I’m pleased to say that they’ve just announced their second round of successes. Three new planets are announced today, detected by the small dip in their parent stars’ brightness as the planet passes in front of it. WASP-3 was discovered by the first set of cameras, on the island of La Palma in the Canaries, but WASP-4 and WASP-5 are the first discoveries from the new station in South Africa. These are fairly typical ‘hot Jupiters’, large planets extremely close to their parent stars. As I’ve said before, WASP is based on a brilliantly simple idea and is an extremely ambitious, but low budget, project and I’m really happy it’s continuing to get new results.

I think that’s what they were trying to say in their press release, here. Unfortunately, an early version claimed that The WASP project is the most ambiguous project in the world designed to discover large planets. I blame the spell checker, but whether ambitious or ambiguous, or both, let’s hope there are lots more WASPy planets to come.

After a Sky at Night filming day earlier in the year, Patrick and I were interviewed for a site called Videojug. You can see our answers to their occasionally random questions here.

I’ve been joking for years about the Sky at Night curse that makes everything interesting happen between filming and broadcast. We finished an excellent interview with Derek Ward Thompson and Carlos Frenk today about one, had lunch and headed back to Oxford. I then opened my email to find news of a bright comet…

It’s Comet Holmew, and it should be at magnitude 17 (ie very faint). Spanish amateurs reported it as magnitude 10 last night, and reports from Japan say it’s now magnitude 3 - visible to the naked eye as a star, in the constellation of Perseus. Patrick tells me it’s notoriously unpredictable, so go outside, look at Perseus and see if there’s anything odd going on.

Look at this. Someone making a sensible point about science education in parliament. OK, so it’s not a politician, it’s Astronomer Royal and cosmologist Martin Rees (also known as Baron Rees of Ludlow), but still. Hopefully someone’s listening, and he’s not shunned for turning up late.

(Incidentally, They Work for You is an excellent site for anyone interested in UK politics - try searching for ‘creationism’, for example.

I’ve just spotted this post on the New Scientist space blog with a list of things for astronomers to do before we die. I’ve done seven of the ten, which suggests it could do with a bit of expansion. I’d include see the Southern sky (for those of us in the North), see a daylight comet (a bit out of our control this one), a total solar eclipse and experience weightlessness. Any other nominations?

It’s been a bit quiet round here, hasn’t it? I didn’t mean to disappear quite so suddenly, but I’ve been thoroughly distracted this summer. Still, I’m back now and I’ve got lots to write about, including trips to JPL, Jodrell and Birr and a guest blog exploring CERN which will be coming up later this week.

Otherwise, it’s been Galaxy Zoo that’s been distracting me. The Telegraph is reporting today on the most interesting of our preliminary results. We should say preliminary in bold, though, because while we’re convinced the signal is real (that is to say, the data really does show this effect) we need to run some tests to check this isn’t human bias at work.

Thanks for bearing with me while I’ve been away from the keyboard; lots more to come over the next few weeks, I promise.