The SuperWASP exoplanet transit survey Alexis Smith Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre, Warsaw Summary Introduction ● Instrumentation ● Observing strategy and ● data reduction Planet discovery process ● Scientific yield ● Exoplanets – Other astrophysics – The future ● SuperWASP – related transit surveys – Some context First exoplanet, 51 Peg b, discovered 1995 ● First transiting exoplanet, HD 209458 b, discovered in ● 1999, but already known by radial velocities Discovery was with small (10 cm) telescope ● (Charbonneau et al. 2000) Numerous projects set up to find more transiting ● planets... Transiting planet surveys Transiting planet surveys Ground-based: ● Deep: – Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) 8 ● Wide-field: – Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) 109* ● Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) 49 ● Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES) 5 ● XO 5 ● Others 17 ● Space-based: ● Convection Rotation & Transits (CoRoT) 23 ● Kepler > 100** ● Sagitarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar ● Planet Search (SWEEPS) 2 * 70 of these published ** + 1000s of candidates The WASP project Consortium of UK universities ● (Queen's Belfast, Keele, St Andrews, Leicester, OU, Cambridge) and Isaac Newton Group (ING) on La Palma PI: Don Pollacco (QUB → Warwick) ● SuperWASP-North (La Palma) 2004 ● WASP-South (Sutherland) 2006 ● Discovered a total of 109 planets to ● date (~70 published) Project described in Pollacco et al. ● (2006) www.superwasp.org ● My involvement in SuperWASP Started in 2005 when I started my PhD at St. ● Andrews: Analysing noise properties of data and predicting – planet yields Follow-up photometry – Keele (postdoc, 2009-12). Worked on WASP-South: ● Operations – Raw data handling – Maintenance / testing trip – Planet discovery – Warsaw (postdoc, 2012-). Still involved in ● Some operations and raw-data handling – Follow-up photometry – Enclosure & mount Fibreglass enclosure with ● slide-away roof Two rooms: ● mount + cameras – computers, supplies – Roof operated hydraulically, ● with battery backup as ultimate failsafe A single Torus fork mount ● 8 cameras – 30'' RMS pointing error – <0.01'' /s tracking error – The cameras 8 Canon 200mm f/1.8 lenses (0.11 m aperture) ● 2048 x 2048 pixel CCD cameras (Andor, Belfast), Peltier ● cooled to -50 ºC Focus is temperature dependent – active focus control (S) / ● heated lenses (N) Field-of-view 7.8º x 7.8º ● – 1 exposure (8 cams) images ~1% of whole sky The weather station Detectors for: ● Rain – Cloud cover – Wind speed & direction – Webcam ● Satellite feed for ● lightning / storm info Allows rapid automatic ● closing of roof