Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No‚ it's a new planet found by a tiny Sutherland telescope

19 May 2016 - 12:41 By TMG Digital

A robotic telescope in Sutherland‚ in the Northern Cape‚ has found a new extrasolar planet. The planet found by the KELT-South telescope has been named KELT-10b. It is of a type dubbed a “hot Jupiter” because of its composition and mass. Hot Jupiters are gas planets that are 70% as massive as Jupiter but 40% larger‚ which makes them look very inflated.Their orbit is about 4.2 days around their parent stars‚ while their surface temperature is about 1100ºC. Extrasolar planets like KELT-10b orbit stars slightly hotter and larger than the Sun‚ yet too dim to see with the naked eye.A statement from the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) said KELT-10b was especially interesting because of its strong transit signal and a fairly bright host star."Those two properties make it such a valuable target for further investigation‚ to learn about the composition of its atmosphere‚ how heat is transferred from its star to the lower gas layers‚ and around to the back side of the planet through the winds."SAAO astronomer Dr Rudi Kuhn‚ who helped to build KELT-South in 2008 during his Master's degree at the University of Cape Town‚ said the process of finding these planets was quite involved.“There are numerous objects that appear to have the same characteristics as transiting planets but turn out to be something else. Careful‚ meticulous investigation is therefore required to identify real transiting planets‚" he said. US collaborator Dr Joshua Pepper said the discovery of KELT-10b was important because “the goal of this search is to find transiting planets orbiting especially bright stars‚ as they are excellent targets for follow-up observations with big telescopes like the Southern African Large Telescope (also in Sutherland) to measure their atmospheres”.The astronomical observatory said ground-based surveys for extrasolar planets had become more successful‚ with their number reaching 130. The surveys use small aperture wide-field robotic telescopes to obtain high-precision photometric light curves of relatively bright stars.Kuhn developed the software that controls the Kilodegree Extremely Small Telescope (KELT) in Sutherland. It controls the telescope‚ which can observe on its own‚ without an astronomer operating it.“Being involved in the construction of the telescope was the fulfilment of a childhood dream‚ enabling me to bring together my interest in both astronomy and computer programming” said Kuhn. Awesome..

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