Software helps the search for planets

A collaborative astronomy venture that is looking for up to 1,000 new planets outside our solar system is to start using sophisticated software to help process the visual data of the night skies.

Launched in April, the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) consortium, involving astronomers from several universities in the UK and abroad, believes it can accelerate the rate of discovery of new planets.

Dr Richard West, a research fellow at the University of Leicester's theoretical astrophysics group, says there are only about 100 planets outside the solar system that are known about.

SuperWASP searches for new celestial bodies by investigating slight dips in the brightness of stars as an object passes in front of them, blocking some of the star's light.

'If we monitor a large number of stars intensively, we should see a shallow dip when a planet passes between us and a star,' said West.

'Obviously there is a low probability of us catching an event such as that with an individual star, but by monitoring so many different stars simultaneously we expect to find anything up to 1,000 planets in the next three to four years.'

The consortium opened the first of its two astronomical observatories in the Canary Islands in April. A second one is being built in South Africa.

When both sites are fully operational, they will each use eight digital cameras that will capture an image of the skies every minute through the night.

With each image some 8MB in size, the sites will generate more than 7GB of data every hour - up to 60GB per night. This data will then be processed using software developed by the consortium and stored in a public database at the University of Leicester.

'Over the life of the project, we anticipate storing about 100TB of image data,' said West.

The university is using a storage system based on a combination of SGI, Engenio and ADIC technologies to capture the data.

The aim is for the visual data to become a public resource for the astrophysics community.'The archive is a legacy for the future of astronomy,' said West.