WASP-3c: The first exoplanet discovered with the telescopes of
the Rozhen National Astronomical Observatory
July 10, 2010
An international team of astronomers from Bulgaria, Germany and Poland discovered an exotic exoplanet in the extrasolar planetary system WASP-3. The group, led by Dr Gracjan Maciejewski of Jena University in Germany, used Transit Timing Variation to detect the new planet. Transit Timing Variation (TTV) was suggested as a new, indirect technique for discovering planets a few years ago. This new method measures deviations in the transit times of a planet which are caused by the disturbing influence of an additional smaller member of the same planetary system. The high sensitivity of the method and the comparison with the results of extensive model calculations allowed the detection of a new planet with 15 times the mass of the Earth, 700 light years from the Sun in the constellation of Lyra.
This is the first time that a new extra-solar planet has been discovered using this method. For this search, the team used the 90-cm telescopes of the University Observatory Jena and the 60-cm telescope of the Rohzen National Astronomical Observatory in Bulgaria to study transits of WASP-3b.
The TTV method is very attractive, because it is particularly sensitive to small perturbing planets, even down to the mass of the Earth. For example, an Earth-mass planet will pull on a typical gas giant planet orbiting close to its star and cause deviations in the timing of the larger objects’ transits of up to 1 minute. This is a big enough effect to be detected with relatively small 1-m diameter telescopes and discoveries can be followed up with larger instruments. The team are now using the 10-m Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas to study WASP-3c in more detail.
More information can be found on www.astro.uni-jena.de/wasp-3.
The research appears in “Transit timing variation in exoplanet WASP-3b”, Maciejewski G., Dimitrov D., Neuhäuser R., Niedzielski A., Raetz St., Ginski Ch., Adam Ch., Marka C., Moulla M., Mugrauer M., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press.
A preprint of the paper can be found at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1006.1348.