Life on other planets?

This interesting looking piece of equipment is called SuperWASP. Or more correctly, it’s one of two SuperWASPs. One is on the island of La Palma in the northern hemisphere while the second is in South Africa.

Despite looking like something a mad inventor might have cobbled together in his garden shed, it’s actually a very sophisticated piece of gear and earlier this week it was announced that it had done something rather clever – finding planets outside our solar system.

In fact, it found three such planets, which have been dubbed Wasp 3b, Wasp 4b and Wasp 5b. These are all planets about the size of Jupiter and they orbit three different stars, all of which are around 700 and 900 light years away. The team behind the project has already found two so-called exoplanets around other stars so that’s quite some haul given that there are only around 250 known ones.

So how do they find them? The SuperWASP looks for transits – the periods in which a planet passes directly in front of its parent star. Since the planet does not emit any light itself, it blocks out some of the starlight, causing an observable dip in the light measured by SuperWASP. The variation is tiny – perhaps just 1% of the total light output – so the technique is best used for huge planets like these.

I think it’s safe to assume that there’ll be some Earth-like planets near these big boys although it may be some time before we can prove their existence. Is it too much to wonder whether there’s life on one of them?