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Science

Discovering Extrasolar Planets in Your Backyard 14

Posted by timothy from the if-your-backyard-is-dark-enough dept.
RobertFisher writes: "As professional astronomers have continuned to build ever more powerful telescopes, the role of amateur astronomers has diminished substantially, mainly to monitoring variable stars and discovering comets. Now a group of professional astronomers at UC Santa Cruz are beginning an exciting new project, to discover extrasolar planets using a network of amateur astronomers who will monitor candidate stars for transits of extrasolar planets. From their website : '...the past several years have seen the introduction of highly affordable small telescopes equipped with sensitive and stable CCD (charge coupled device) detectors, and controlled by laptop computers. Thousands of amateur astronomers already own observatories which, when properly configured, are capable of reliably detecting the periodic dimming which occurs when a close-in giant planet passes in front of the parent star as seen from Earth.'"
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Discovering Extrasolar Planets in Your Backyard

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  • If we find one, how named? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @11:14PM (#4225251) Journal
    If an amature finds a planet that way, do they get to name it whatever they want, including things like "Micosoftbiteme" or "OOPsucksEggs"?

    Or it is a group effort where the data is shared and no one person gets sole naming credit?

    I suppose one could pick a star set and monitor them all by themselves. However, one can only do this at night. If the transits happen during the day, you might miss them. Plus, atmospheric angle may affect the results, greatly limiting accurate light level monitoring. (Multiple observers can be used to average out such discrepancy.)

    Still, I suppose one could get some buddies or family members abroad to set up such scopes in multiple locations around the world.

    Then again, that is a lot of effort just to get a planet named whatever they want it to be named. It might make more sense to hunt comets using that method if you really want naming credit.

    Another problem is that they name the comet after your name rather than your preference, so I could not call it "OOPsucksEgss Comet" after all. Well, I suppose I could get may name legally changed to "Mr. OOPsucksEggs", and *then* discover a comet. But, that is getting carried away I suppose.

    But it must be wacky hopes similar to these which motivate so many amateur astronomers to spend tens of K on such equipment. Either that they are not married and have no kids and don't get off on sports cars, so where else are they gonna spend the money?

    Wealthy single geeks on shopping sprees. What a concept.
    • Most of the amateur astronomers I know are married and/or have kids. (Though if the kids are grown so much the better and if you're retired and have lots of time and some $$ so much the better still). We just want to find some habitable planets to send those kids off to!
      ---
      There's no such thing as free love.
  • Charged Coupled Device:
    A charge-coupled device (CCD) is a specially made integrated circuit that responds to light. CCDs are used to capture and store image data in telescopes, scanners, bar code readers, and digital still and video cameras. A good CCD can produce an image in extremely dim light, and its resolution (i.e., sharpness or data density) doesn't degrade in low light the way those of film cameras do.

  • Interesting project... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drudd ( 43032 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @12:35PM (#4229103)
    Disclaimer: I'm a theorist, so everything I say is probably wrong :)

    When I was at Santa Cruz for a graduate prospective visit I heard a talk about this project.

    Essentially the idea is you assign amateur astronomers stars to examine (kind of like SETI@Home's work units). They take exposures of the star, and reduce their own data. Each night's work reduces to a single point, essentially the luminosity of the star at that time.

    The way you detect transiting planets (or transiting binaries for that matter) is by detecting shifts in luminosity of the star.

    The central project then uses the data points from multiple observers over time to detect the transit.

    The talk essentially was a proof of concept, they did their own observations, then made monte carlo simulations of observations, including scatter and bad data to try and simulate amateur mistakes. They used this on a known transiting planet and determined that they could detect the planet with this system.

    The nice thing about making this a distributed project is that you hopefully gather enough data to survive different places being clouded out, and you don't have to worry about getting telescope time on bigger telescopes until you think you've detected something.

    Doug

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