Jul 19 2017
A new ‘Hot Jupiter’ exoplanet has been discovered by Scientists led by a team at Keele University. The new giant planet was jointly discovered by a WASP/KELT survey alliance, making this the first time an exoplanet has been discovered between two planet search teams.
Credit: Keele University
The exoplanet, WASP-167b/KELT-13b, is numerous times bigger than Jupiter and orbits its parent star every two days. Its host star, WASP-176/KELT-13, is one of the hottest and most swiftly rotating stars known to host such a planet.
The Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) and the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) exoplanet surveys tracked the host star between 2006 and 2013 using the WASP-South telescope and the KELT-South telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). A follow-up observation in 2016 at the European South Observatory (ESO) verified the existence of the exoplanet.
Planet-search teams are only just beginning to find hot-Jupiter planets with hot, fast-rotating host stars. This is only the second of what I hope will be many WASP planets that fall into this category. Already we are seeing characteristic properties that contrast those we’ve seen before, and I’m looking forward to filling in this emerging big picture with more new discoveries. This is the first planet discovery where two teams have collaborated, pooling all of the data to produce the best possible characterization of the system.
Lorna Temple, Astrophysics Researcher at Keele University