Current Status of the SuperWASP Project

Details Current Status of the SuperWASP Project Current Status of the SuperWASP Project

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004aas...20517101c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 205, #171.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37, p.375

Computer Science

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Scientific paper

We present the current status of the SuperWASP project, an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanetary transits. Each instrument consists of up to eight cameras backed by high-quality passively-cooled CCDs, to photometrically survey large numbers of stars in the magnitude range 7-15. Each camera covers a largely distinct 7.8x7.8-degree field of view, as a result of which roughly 25,000 stars brighter than 13th magnitude are surveyed per field per camera for exoplanet transit events. Located on La Palma, the SuperWASP-I instrument has been observing the Northern Hemisphere with five cameras since its April 2004 inauguration. The resulting dataset provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate hardware and software performance, to optimise observing efficiency and inform the construction of the Southern-hemisphere SuperWASP-II instrument in 2005.
The collaboration has developed a custom-built reduction pipeline and aims to achive better than 1% photometric precision. Roughly four genuine transiting exoplanetary systems per field per camera will be detected through repeat transit events over the interval in which these systems are visible, though perhaps ten times this number of false-positives will also be observed. By monitoring a large number of fields over its lifetime, SuperWASP will provide ephemerides for roughly 104 systems exhibiting candidate exoplanet transits. These first-alarm ephemerides will be used to perform incremental followup observations of the candidates, separating out the false-positives and constraining the properties of the true exoplanets. The resulting planet harvest will increase the known exoplanet population by roughly an order of magnitude. The pipeline will also produce well-sampled lightcurves for all unblended objects in each field, providing a rich photometric dataset to pursue the secondary science goals of the project, including detection of optical transients and detailed studies of stellar variability at the 1% level.
SuperWASP is a consortium of Queen's University Belfast, The University of Cambridge, the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Keele University, Leicester University, the Open University and St Andrews University.

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