European astronomers have recorded three new foreign gas giants in the SuperWASP project. Two of them belong to the hot Saturns, and the third - the super-Neptune.
WASP is an international global search program for exoplanets using transit photometry. For this, two robotic observatories are involved: SuperWASP-North (Canary Islands) and SuperWASP-South (South Africa). They have eight wide-angle cameras, simultaneously tracking the sky on the planetary transit events. This allows you to explore millions of stars.
Recently managed to fix the signals from the three stars - WASP-151, WASP-153 and WASP-156. Later they used the SOPHIE spectrograph on a 1.93-meter telescope to confirm the planetary nature. The largest planet is WASP-153b. Its radius exceeds Jupiter by 1.55 times, and mass - 0.39. The orbital period lasts 3.33 days, and the temperature - 1701 K.
WASP-151b exceeds Jupiter by 13%, and weight - 0.31. It warms up to 1291 K, and the orbital period is 4.53 days.
The first two planets are low density gas giants. Revolve around G-type stars. Belong to the category of hot Saturn.
WASP-156b occupies half the size of Jupiter and 0.13 mass. Temperature index - 1291 K, and on the orbital route spends 3.83 days. It rotates around a K-type star and is ranked as super-Neptune.
Scientists believe that these are important findings that will help to understand the “Neptunian desert” - the depletion of exoplanets during short orbital periods.
