Jan 7 2015
“It could be a miniature version of the ice giant planet Neptune,” said PHAS Professor and the chief scientist with Canada's first space telescope MOST, Dr. Jaymie Matthews. “An even more exciting possibility is that it’s three-quarters water.”
Artist’s conception of new exoplanet. Image courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
Canada's MOST telescope (the Microvariability and Oscillations of STars satellite) teamed up with NASA’s Kepler space telescope to confirm the discovery of a new planet 180 light years away from Earth. The newly confirmed exoplanet’s official name is HIP 116454 b. Its diameter is 2.5 times of earth, with a mass 12 times of earth's mass, thereby classified as a "Super-Earth."
The planet was first spotted by a team of U.S. researchers using NASA's Kepler space telescope. However, as Kepler moved on to track other parts of the sky, the team didn't get the necessary information to confirm the planet's existence - so they called in some help. Jaymie and his team then pointed MOST in the right direction to confirm what was found in the Kepler data. MOST saw the star’s light level dim slightly as the exoplanet passed between it and the space telescope.
While the new planet is too close to its sun to be habitable, Jaymie is very hopeful. "This Super-Earth may have neighbours, and one might be in the star’s habitable zone. Only time and careful study of this system will tell."
One thing to note is that MOST recently lost its funding from the Canadian Space Agency. “Maybe the real story is that a tiny Canadian space telescope, given up by the federal government as no longer worth $300,000 per year, can stand beside a $700-million NASA satellite in terms of producing frontier science,” said Jaymie. The telescope now operates on a "pay-per view" model, being loaned out to scientists who would like to use the telescope and are willing to pay for the data.