16 December 2010
An Artist’s rendition of the newly discovered planet Qatar-1b
Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
An international team of astronomers, led by Arab country Qatar, has discovered a new planet, orbiting a distant star. Planets orbiting other stars are termed extrasolar planets or exoplanets. The newly found exoplanet is now known as Qatar-1b. The growing number of detected exoplanets has become 510. The team of researchers consists of Qatar astronomers, headed by Dr. Khaled Al Subai, collaborating with scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and other institutions.
Qatar-1b is a giant Jupiter-like planet that is 20 percent larger in diameter, and 10 percent more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System. Because it orbits only 3.5 million km from its star, Qatar-1b’s temperature is over 1,000 C, and it lasts 1.4 days, to complete an orbit. For comparison, Earth orbits the Sun every 365.25 days, approximately, at a distance of about 150 million km.
"The discovery of Qatar-1b is a great achievement -- one that further demonstrates Qatar's commitment to becoming a leader in innovative science and research," said Dr. Khalid Al Subai, leader of the Qatar exoplanet survey and a research director of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. "This discovery marks the beginning of a new era of collaborative astrophysics research between Qatar, the United Kingdom, and the United States," Dr. Al Subai added.
The Qatar exoplanet survey hunts for exoplanets by scanning the skies for stars that "wink," dimming slightly, when an orbiting planet passes in front of its star, as viewed from Earth. Such surveys must meticulously examine thousands of stars, to find few detectable planets. Interestingly, the elaborate observations and analysis produce opportunities for global teamwork.
To discover the new world, Qatar's wide-angle cameras, located in New Mexico, USA, took images of the sky every clear night, beginning in early 2010. The images then were transmitted to the UK for analysis by astronomers from St. Andrews and Leicester Universities and Qatar. That analysis detected a few hundred candidate stars.
Dr. Al Subai, with the Harvard-Smithsonian team, followed up on the most likely candidates, making spectroscopic observations with the 60-inch-diameter telescope at the Smithsonian's Whipple Observatory in Arizona. They also made precise measurements of the stars' dimming with Whipple's 48-inch telescope.
The resulting data confirmed the existence of Qatar-1b, whose star is orange in color, considerably smaller and cooler than the Sun, and lies 550 light-years away.
References
CfA’s online press release
Al Subai’s Project Homepage
Wikipedia
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist