On a wing and a prayer, Canada's 'pay-per-view' satellite finds new planet
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Image of an exoplanet whose existence was confirmed by the MOST satellite operated by the University of British Columbia. Provided photo / Ottawa Citizen
A suitcase-sized Canadian satellite whose funding has been eliminated by the Canadian Space Agency has co-discovered a new planet in another solar system.
The MOST space telescope, just 65 centimetres wide and 25 deep, also confirmed the planet is 2.5 times bigger than Earth, and is probably mostly water or ice.
The discovery comes just as the Canadian Space Agency is winding up all funding for MOST, which must now operate as a rent-a-telescope.
It shares the discovery with NASA's giant Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler and MOST (an acronym for Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars) are both in orbit.
"Maybe the real story is that a tiny Canadian space telescope, given up by the federal government as no longer worth $300,000 per year, can stand beside a $700-million NASA satellite in terms of producing frontier science," astronomer Jaymie Matthews wrote. He's from the University of British Columbia and is the chief scientist for MOST.
He's now renting out telescope time to other astronomers, and calls it "pay-per-view."
The planet story begins with Kepler, a NASA instrument that weighs a tonne, or 20 times more than MOST.
Kepler has had a mechanical failure and its operators are trying to redesign its mission. During a trial run, Harvard University astronomers found one star that appeared to go dimmer and then brighter, hinting that a planet may have passed in front of it — a movement called a transit. But they needed proof.
"One transit does not make a planet," Matthews said in an interview by email.
"The Harvard team asked me if MOST could look for additional transits. Kepler could not go back to this particular star, and MOST is the only game in town to do this, able to point at many parts of the sky inaccessible to Kepler.
"We cancelled and rescheduled observations of our planned target … (and) found additional transits, which confirmed the planet and gave it a period." That's the time it takes to make one orbit of its star.
"A super-Earth planet — especially one whose composition may be dominated by water — around a relatively bright star not all that far from us, is something that generates a lot of excitement in the exoplanetary science community," he wrote. Exoplanets are planets that don't orbit our sun.
If this one is icy, it would be something like Neptune. If not, it's likely one-quarter metal and the rest water, though likely too close to its sun to support life.
"If this planet turns out to be a 'Waterworld' and if our follow-up of the star discovers another planet in the system in the Habitable Zone, then this will be the start of something very big."
Matthews has a "closeout" contract with the Canadian Space Agency allowing him to process and archive data already collected, but not to search for more. This ends in April.
But there's always pay-per-view.
"A team of Yale astronomers realized that MOST was the only game in town for them too," he said. "They needed MOST to observe two stars for two months, and were willing to pay for the data." That brought in $50,000, and there are a couple of customers lined up for 2015.
Matthews is also looking for donations.
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