Youngest planet and 10 new ones discovered
WASHINGTON - Astronomers using robotic cameras said yesterday that they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had discovered the youngest planet yet.
The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast.
The robot team is called SuperWASP, for Wide Area Search for Planets, and the cameras look for planets transiting, or crossing in front of, their stars. The light from the sun fades just slightly when this happens, and astronomers can extrapolate the size and location of the planet.
Most planets around other stars have been found using a different method, measuring the tiny tugs that a planet makes on its sun's gravitational field.
Don Pollaco of Queen's University in Belfast and colleagues used banks of cameras in Spain's Canary Islands, South Africa, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, France, and Australia to discover the 10 extrasolar planets.
The planets range in mass from half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times that.
Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and colleagues said they found a baby planet while using radio astronomy to examine a disk of gas and rocky particles around the star HL Tau. This star is thought to also be young, 100,000 years old compared with our 4.6-billion-year-old sun.
