The Vulcan-South telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a couple of weeks after sunset. Photo: J. Dana Hrubes.

At first thought, attempting to find planets orbiting around stars other than our Sun would appear to be almost impossible. Any light from the planet would be swamped by that from the vastly more luminous star. However, some fraction of planets will occasionally pass in front of their host stars as viewed from the earth, and when they do so, the light from the star will be slightly reduced. While the chances of such an event are small, there are so many stars in our Galaxy that the overall probability of detection is quite high.

We are employing this technique for finding so-called ‘extra-solar’ planets on two telescopes: the UNSW Automated Patrol Telescope (APT) at Siding Spring Observatory, and the Vulcan-South telescope at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Michael Ashley and Jessie Christiansen visited the South Pole to help set up this latter experiment. The grand hope is that we shall find a planet/star system with suitable properties to enable us to study the characteristics of any atmosphere present around the planet, during transit. In principle, spectral features could be identified such as molecular oxygen and/or methane that may indicate the presence of life elsewhere in the universe.

During the year Michael Ashley and John Webb were awarded an Australian Research Council LIEF grant for $376k to build a new CCD camera for the APT. The camera is being constructed at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and should see first light in 2006. It will increase the APT efficiency by at least a factor of ten and makes our extra-solar planet survey extremely competitive.

Marton Hidas, Jessie Christiansen,
Michael Ashley and John Webb