| David M Wilson |
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| David M Wilson |
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Confirmed image of exoplanet orbiting brown dwarf
Live webcam view of SuperWASP-South Observatory, South Africa |
SuperWASP - Wide Angle Search for Planets In October 2007, after three years of study with the Keele University Astrophysics Group, I submitted my PhD thesis titled "The search for transiting extrasolar planets with SuperWASP" which was supervised by Dr Pierre Maxted. Following this I continued my extrasolar planet research with SuperWASP as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at Keele. SuperWASP is a collaboration of eight academic institutions conducting an ultra-wide angle photometric survey of the sky searching for transiting extrasolar planets, near-earth asteroids and optical transients. When complete it will be the largest planetary transit survey in the world with over 100TB of image data. SuperWASP consists of two robotic observatories; The first is based on La Palma in the Canary Islands and the second is in Sutherland, South Africa. Each consists of eight wide-angle lenses (200-millimeter f/1.8 Canon) backed with science-grade 2kx2k e2v CCDs. Each observatory has a field of view of nearly 500 square degrees and produces around 50Gb of data per night. The system is able to image the entire visible sky several times a night with software measuring the brightness of every object in its field of view from magnitude 8 to 13 with a precision of about 1% (0.01 magnitudes). Extra-solar planets are detected using the 'transit' method when an extrasolar planet passes in front of its parent star obscuring a small proportion of the star light [Diagram]. By constantly observing many millions of stars for several months, periodic variations in brightness can be detected and a planet confirmed with high-precision radial-velocity follow-up measurements. This method favours gas-giant planets known as hot-Jupiters that orbit extremely close to their parent star. Keele astrophysics group is responsible for setting-up and running the SuperWASP-South observatory in Sutherland, South Africa which started observations in March 2006. To see the status of the observatory click here. Photos can be found here. For more information on the project see www.superwasp.org |
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Research Activities (as of
01/12/2008) (Publication
List): - SuperWASP Website - I have re-written the SuperWASP website which can be accessed here: www.superwasp.org. - Variable Star Investigator (VSI) - this is a virtual observatory stellar investigation tool used by SuperWASP to select and prioritise planetary candidates. - Postgraduate Research Symposium (15/06/05) - I gave a short presentation on the SuperWASP project at this year's Keele symposium and also won the competition to design the booklet front cover for which I was awarded £100. - SuperWASP-South observatory - I have assisted in the construction of the SuperWASP-South robotic observatory in Sutherland, South Africa. More information can be found by clicking here and photos can be found here.
- BA Festival of Science 'Perspectives' Poster Competition (5-9/09/05) - I reached the finals of the 'Perspectives' Poster competition where I had to explain the social and
ethical impacts of my research area. I attended the BA Festival of Science at Trinity College in Dublin where I presented my poster to the
public and a panel of judges. I won the 'People's Choice' award for my poster, as voted by the public, and attended the BA Festival Dinner.
- House of Commons Physics Reception (15/11/05) - I was selected to present at the 'Set for Britain' Physics Reception held at the Houses of Parliament to promote Britain's
younger physicists as part of 'Einstein Year' and the 'World year of Physics'. - Linear Limb darkening co-efficients for SuperWASP passband (filtered and unfiltered) - Co-efficients are based on values from Van Hammme (1993) for main-sequence stars and convolved to SW passbands. Filtered (2006+) Unfiltered (2004) - "SuperWASP observations of transiting planet XO-1b" - paper accepted by PASP (paper). - SuperWASP discovers its first two transiting planets (27/09/06) Astro-ph - I was involved in the selection and follow-up of candidates at the Observatoire de Haute Provence (1.93m/SOPHIE spectrograph) which led to SuperWASP's discovery of its first two planets (WASP-1b & WASP-2b). See the BBC News article.
- 'Transiting Planets' conference MPIA, Heidelberg (24-29/09/2006) -
I attended the inaugural Transiting planet conference where the discovery
of SuperWASP's first planets was announced and I presented a poster on
candidate selection. - Seminar SAAO (10/2007) - I gave a seminar talk to the South African Astronomical Observatory (Cape Town) on the development of the SuperWASP-South observatory and data products. - 'Observing Planetary Systems' conference Santiago, Chile (5-8/03/2007) - Here I presented a talk, in conjunction with Becky Enoch, on the current status of the SuperWASP project and future prospects. (OPS talk.pdf) - Astronomy Now article (Mar-2007) - I was featured in an article on SuperWASP as part of Astronomy Now's extra-solar planet special. To download the article click here. - Hunter Results interface: I have developed a sophisticated PHP/MySQL web interface for searching, selecting and analysing the several hundreds of thousands of transiting planet candidates produced by the SuperWASP project. The interface has been highly successful and is the primary system for selecting planetary candidates and managing international follow-up observations. - PhD Thesis: "The search for transiting extra-solar planets with SuperWASP" (abstract) Full version (pdf). - Keele PDRA - I have been appointed as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at Keele beginning in Oct 2007. - "WASP-4b: a 12th-magnitude transiting hot-Jupiter in the Southern hemisphere" - accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (paper). See the BBC News article - Planet discoveries - The discovery of three new planets by SuperWASP (WASP-3b, WASP-4b and WASP-5b) has been voted the 6th most important scientific discovery of 2007 by Time Magazine. Click Here - Royal Society Summer Science 2008 Exhibit "Is there anybody out there? Looking for new worlds" (photo) (presentation.ppt)
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