Today's news is about the identification of three new planets outside of our solar system. A blog by Daniel Cressey at Nature.com identified the new planets as Wasp1, Wasp 4 and Wasp 5. The naming convention struck me as a little odd but reading through the article I found a reference to the Super WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) on Wikipedia. The WASP consist of two wide angled, robotic observatories located at the Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, in the Canary Islands - I've been there, the caldera is fantastic to walk around. Is part of the South African Astronomical Observatory and consists of two telescopes each with an array of eight canon 200mm f1.8 lenses fitted with CCD's to a resolution of 2000x2000 pixels.
The Super WASP telescopes are operated as part of a consortium of eight academic institutions which include the University of Cambridge, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Keele University, the University of Leicester, the Open University, Queen's University Belfast and St. Andrews University. It is hoped that SuperWASP will revolutionize our understanding of planet formation paving the way for future space missions searching for 'Earth'-like worlds. The array and separation of the telescopes allows the observatory to have a field of view of around 500 sq degrees.
In September 2006 the WASP observatory identified Wasp 1b and WASP 2b orbiting around a planet similar in mass to Jupiter. The orbital period of these planets is calculated at less than 2 days and are among the shortest orbital periods ever discovered. On October 31, 2007, the team reported the discovery of three extrasolar planets: WASP-3b, WASP-4b and WASP-5b. The discoveries make the SuperWASP team the first and only one to detect planets in both the northern and southern hemispheres using the transit detection technique. The WASP-4b and WASP-5b planets are the first planets discovered by the WASP project's cameras in South Africa, while WASP-3b is the third planet discovered by the WASP project's cameras in La Palma.
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