Essential Information
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Royal Observatory
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02 Apr 2008
What a start to this years' NAM!
The day began with the announcement (by Don Pollacco, Queen's University Belfast) that the UK Super-WASP project has discovered a staggering 10 new planets orbiting distant stars! (see the BBC News coverage)
We call such planets exoplanets. The new planets were discovered by looking at a vast number of stars every night and seeing if the brightness of any of those stars dipped for a few hours - the tale-tale sign that a planet had just passed in front of its parent star. It took astronomers 8 years to discover the first 23 planets using this method - but WASP has discovered an addition 10 in just 6 months! The next few years look very exciting for planet finders... but astronomers are already planning the next generation to WASP which would be sensitive to smaller harder-to-spot planets.
Astronomers now know of nearly 300 planets orbiting distant stars.