A WELSH university has played its part in the discovery of a new comet billions of times fainter than the human eye can detect.
The Faulkes Telescope Project at the University of Glamorgan helped an international team of astronomers confirm the comet with Ernesto Guido from the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy.
“To say we’re over the moon would be an understatement – this was one of the trickiest comets we’ve ever worked on as it was extremely faint and has a very small tail,” said Professor Paul Roche of the University of Glamorgan, who runs the Faulkes Telescope Project.
“It’s fantastic that we managed to nail this one during the airing of the Stargazing Live shows, and to have a UK school taking some of the crucial observations was just the icing on the cake.”
Work to find the comet formed part of a research project devoted to detecting and refining the orbits of icy objects in the far reaches of the Solar System.
The observation was coordinated by the Faulkes Telescope Pro-Am programme manager, Nick Howes, along with the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and schools and amateur astronomers from around the world.
Howes contacted Arizona-based astronomer Jim Scotti, who had first observed the object, via social network site Twitter.
Howes said: “It became clear from speaking to Jim that he thought they had seen something interesting, and he encouraged us to perform additional observations to make sure that it really was what we suspected.”
The new comet is so faint to the human eye, it needed to be monitored by Howes and Guido using the two-metre diameter Faulkes Telescope North based in Hawaii.
The telescopes are perfectly suited to imaging very faint objects, and are controlled remotely via the internet.
Fortunately, the position of the comet in the sky also allowed them to request additional observations from a group of school students working with teacher Peter Phelps at Hazlemere Church of England School in Buckinghamshire.
“The initial data from Faulkes North was not 100% clear, as the object was so faint,” Howes added.
“But we suspected it was a comet, and asked for more images. Luckily Hazlemere School were able to help out.”
The extra images provided by the school group were enough to convince scientists that it was indeed a newly-discovered comet.
The Minor Planet Centre, the official body that recognises the discoveries of new asteroids and comets, confirmed the discovery on January 8.
They listed the Faulkes observations and Hazlemere School’s contribution in the announcement of the new comet - now called P2012 A2 Scotti.