By Gail Gallessich

An international team of astronomers has found 10 new “extra solar” planets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun.

The team used a system of robotic cameras that yielded a great deal of information about these other worlds. The camera system is expected to revolutionize scientific understanding of how planets form. The international collaboration is called “SuperWASP,” for Wide Area Search for Planets, and is based in Britain.

Two participating astronomers from the U.S. are Rachel Street and Tim Lister. Street is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN) located in Santa Barbara. Lister is a project scientist with LCOGTN.

Astronomers look for “transits,” moments when planets pass in front of stars, as viewed from the Earth. This technique of locating the planets gives more information about the formation and evolution of the planets than the gravitational technique. For example, the transits allow deduction of the size and mass of each planet.

In the last six months the SuperWASP team has used two batteries of cameras, one in Spain’s Canary Islands and one in South Africa, to discover the 10 new extra solar planets. Team leader, Don Pollaco of Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, announced the findings earlier this month in a talk at the Royal Astronomical Society’s national astronomy meeting in Britain.

The SuperWASP computerized cameras survey a large area of the sky at one time for transits. Each night astronomers receive data from millions of stars. A team of collaborators around the world follows up each possible planet found by SuperWASP with more detailed observations to confirm or reject the discovery.

The astronomers working at LCOGTIN <http://lcogt.net/> use robotically controlled telescopes in Arizona, Hawaii, and Australia. A total of 46 planets have been found to transit their stars. Since they started operation in 2004, SuperWASP cameras have discovered 15 of these.

The planets discovered by SuperWASP have masses between half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.

A number of these new worlds are very exotic. For example, a year, or one orbit, on WASP-12b, is just a bit over one day. This planet is so close to its star that its daytime temperature could reach a searing 2,300 degrees Celsius.

Lister and Street from LCOGTN/UCSB are delighted with the results. Street described the discovery as a “very big step forward for the field.”

Lister said, “The flood of new discoveries from SuperWASP will revolutionize our understanding of how planets form. LCOGTN’s flexible global network of telescopes is an indispensable part of the worldwide effort to learn about the new planets.”

Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN) is a privately funded, nonprofit organization that is creating a cutting-edge science program paired with an innovative education program.