Four new short-period giant planets discovered
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-short-period-giant-planets.html
Astronomers have detected four new giant exoplanets as part of the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network-South (HATSouth) exoplanet survey.
The newly found alien worlds are about the size of Jupiter, but less massive. They transit moderately bright stars and have short orbital periods.
The findings were presented July 22 in a paper published on arXiv.org.
HATSouth is a network of six astrograph telescope systems located in South America, Africa, and Australia. These telescopes are designed to detect
transiting extrasolar planets in orbit around relatively bright stars visible from the Southern hemisphere. Since its launch in 2009, the network
has already detected dozens of transiting exoplanets.
Now, the list of planets detected by HATSouth has expanded. In a recent paper, a team of researchers led by Rafael Brahm of the Pontifical Catholic
University of Chile in Santiago presents the discovery of four new planets, HATS-43b, HATS-44b, HATS-45b, and HATS-46b. The planetary nature of
transiting signals detected by HATSouth was confirmed by follow-up spectroscopic and photometric observations using various instruments, including
the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network at the Cerro Tololo International Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
This extensive observational campaign that led to the discovery of four new alien worlds was carried out from December 2009 to October 2016.
