NewsThe Smallest Exoplanet Found so Far That Is Orbiting an Ordinary Star 27 Jan 2006 As part of an international collaboration, RoboNet contributed to the discovery of a new extrasolar planet, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, by making use of the microlensing technique. The new planet has 5.5 times the mass of the Earth, less than any other of the 170 exoplanets found until now around main-sequence stars. Its host star is an M-dwarf in the Galactic Bulge at a distance of 6.6 kpc from the Sun. Its orbit has a radius of 2.6 AU, which implies a temperature comparable to those of Neptune or Pluto in our Solar System. This detection suggests that cool, sub-Neptune mass objects are more common than gas giants in orbits around the most common stars of our Galaxy. RoboNet has now been involved in two out of the three exoplanet discoveries using microlensing. Further information can be found here The results were published in Nature.
Multi-Color Light Curve of Gamma Ray Burst 20 May 2005 The 2 m robotic Liverpool Telescope reacted promptly to the gamma-ray burst GRB 050502a, and started observing 3 minutes after the onset of the burst. The automatic identification of a bright afterglow with r'~15.8 mag triggered, for the first time, an observation sequence in four different filters, covering the full visible spectrum from blue to red, during the first hour after a GRB. The spectrum and the light curve suggest a uniform circumburst medium with clumps in density, as in the case of GRB 021004. Further information can be found here. The results were published in a letter to The Astrophysical Journal.
Publications about other results obtained with Robonet can be found here. |
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