3.2  An introduction to professional transit searches

The next video focuses on SuperWASP, one of the first and most successful projects that searches for exoplanet transits. SuperWASP is able to measure the brightness of many stars simultaneously. This allows it to find the small fraction of stars that show regular dips in their brightness, revealing that they each host a planet whose orbit happens to be aligned so that a transit can be seen. The Open University is a part of the SuperWASP consortium. These planets are all given names like WASP-12 b, where 12 indicates that it was the twelfth planet found by SuperWASP.

SuperWASP [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]