A team of UK, French, and Swiss astronomers has discovered two new Jupiter-sized planets around stars in the constellations of Andromeda and Delphinus with the help of several Andor cameras
These planets are the first to be found during the UK-led Superwasp (wide angle search for planets) programme.
Using wide-angle camera lenses, backed by several Andor iKon L large area CCD cameras (DW436 NBV), each housing a vacuum sealed, TE cooled E2V 42-40 sensor with 2kx2k pixels.
The Superwasp team has been repeatedly surveying several million stars over vast swathes of the sky, looking for the tiny dips in the starlight caused when a planet passes in front of its star.
This is known as a transit.
"The system we now have is particularly powerful - we are very happy with our cameras and they enable Superwasp to find candidate planets and determines their radii" said Don Pollacco of the school of mathematics and physics at Queen's University Belfast (QUB), the Superwasp project scientist.
Pollacco also leads the Superwasp team at QUB, which comprises Francis Keenan and Alan Fitzsimmons, and Rachel Street, Damian Christian and Robert Ryans.
"We have worked with Pollacco and his team over the last few years, developing these cameras.
"These systems are extremely wide-field - 2000x greater than a conventional telescope.
"The cameras continuously photograph the night sky, each camera capable of up to 50,000 stars per image" said Andor's marketing manager, Mark Donaghy.
The planets themselves, known as Wasp-1b and Wasp-2b, are of a type known as 'hot Jupiters'.
They are both giant gas planets, like Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, but they are much closer to their parent star.
The Superwasp team is currently planning follow-up observations of the two new planetary systems with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope in order to measure more accurately the sizes and temperatures of the planets, and also to look for indications of any other planets in these systems.
Superwasp is expected to find dozens more transiting planets over the next few years.
