Team finds three new ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanets

It looks like new Olympians need to be added to the pantheon, because three new exoplanets belonging to the “hot Jupiter” family have just been discovered by an international team of astronomers, according to a new paper on arXiv.

The planets—named Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b, and Qatar-5b—were identified by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES), which is operated by the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) run out of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Doha, Qatar. The survey involved a robotic wide-field camera system in New Mexico to trawl the universe searching for gas giants as they transit (cross in front of) their host stars, according to Phys.org.

And so far, this system has yielded results—in 2010 and 2011, it detected Qatar-1b and Qatar-2b, and now have come out again with the three new exoplanets.

After the international team—which is led by Khalid Al-Subai, QEERI’s acting executive director—made the most recent discoveries, they quickly deployed the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES) at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, Arizona and the four-foot (1.23 m) Zeiss Telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain in order to determine the physical characteristics of the planets.

Detailing the characteristics of the new planets

They discovered that all three are what are known as “hot Jupiters,” or gas giants that have similar characteristics to Jupiter. This class of planet orbits around its central star in less than 10 days and logically have extremely high surface temperatures since they are so close to their parent stars. For these three exoplanets, temperatures range from 1400 K (2060 F, or 1130 C) to 1700 K (2600 F, or 1430 C).

Of the three, Qatar-4b is the biggest and most massive—its radius is about 1.55 times that of Jupiter, and it’s nearly six times more massive. Further, it completes an orbit around its host star in 1.8 days.

Qatar-3b and Qatar-4b are smaller with a similar size and mass. Both have radii 1.1 times that of Jupiter and have about 4.3 times the mass. The main difference between the two is the length of their orbits; Qatar-3b takes two and a half days, while Qatar-5b takes about three.

All in all, this study shows the value of ground-based surveys like QES and has helped create a fuller picture of the hot Jupiter family. With luck, more work will be done in this manner that will help fill in more gaps, such as the origin of hot Jupiters and the architecture of their planetary systems.

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Image credit: QNA

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