Aquarius is an equatorial constellation of the zodiac, between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier", and its old astronomical symbol is (♒︎), a representation of water. Aquarius is one of the oldest of the recognized constellations along the zodiac. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. It is found in a region often called the Sea due to its profusion of constellations with watery associations such as Cetus the whale, Pisces the fish, and Eridanus the river.
WASP or Wide Angle Search for Planets is an international consortium of several academic organisations performing an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using transit photometry. The array of robotic telescopes aims to survey the entire sky, simultaneously monitoring many thousands of stars at an apparent visual magnitude from about 7 to 13.
Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported as of April 2014 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.
WASP-13b, also known as Cruinlagh, is an extrasolar planet that was discovered in 2008 in the orbit of the sunlike star WASP-13. The planet has a mass of nearly half that of Jupiter, but a radius five-quarters of the size of Jupiter. This low relative mass might be caused by a core that is of low mass or that is not present at all.
WASP-15b, formally named Asye, is an extrasolar planet discovered in 2008 by the SuperWASP collaboration, which seeks to discover exoplanets that transit their host stars. The planet orbits its host star at a distance of 0.05 AU every four days. The mass of this planet is about one half that of Jupiter, but its radius is nearly 50% larger than Jupiter's, making the density of this planet only one quarter that of water; it is thought that some other form of heating must explain its extremely low density. WASP-15b's discovery was published on April 29, 2009.
WASP-13, also named Gloas, is a star in the Lynx constellation. The star is similar, in terms of metallicity and mass, to the Sun, although it is hotter and most likely older. The star was first observed in 1997, according to the SIMBAD database, and was targeted by SuperWASP after the star was observed by one of the SuperWASP telescopes beginning in 2006. Follow-up observations on the star led to the discovery of planet Cruinlagh in 2008; the discovery paper was published in 2009.
WASP-15, also named Nyamien, is a magnitude 11 star located about 1000 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. The star, which is more massive, larger, hotter, and more luminous than the Sun, is also less metal-rich than the Sun. WASP-15 has one known planet in its orbit, WASP-15b; the planet is a Hot Jupiter with an anomalously high radius, a phenomenon which may be explained by the presence of an internal heat source. The star was first observed by the SuperWASP program in 2006; future measurements in 2007 and 2008, as well as follow-up observations and analysis, eventually led to the discovery of WASP-15b using the transit method and Doppler spectroscopy.
HD 154672 b is an extrasolar planet located approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation of Ara, orbiting the metal-rich and aged star HD 154672. This planet has a minimum mass five times that of Jupiter and orbits at about 60% the distance between the Earth to the Sun. Its orbit is very elliptical, which causes temperatures on the planet to vary significantly as it proceeds along its orbit. This planet was discovered in Las Campanas Observatory on September 5, 2008 using the radial velocity method. Along with HD 205739 b, the planets were the first to be discovered by the N2K Consortium using the Magellan Telescopes.
Leonhard Euler Telescope, or the Swiss EULER Telescope, is a national, fully automatic 1.2-metre (47 in) reflecting telescope, built and operated by the Geneva Observatory. It is located at an altitude of 2,375 m (7,792 ft) at ESO's La Silla Observatory site in the Chilean Norte Chico region, about 460 kilometers north of Santiago de Chile. The telescope, which saw its first light on 12 April 1998, is named after Swiss mathematician Leonhard Paul Euler.
HD 204313 b is an extrasolar planet which orbits the G-type main sequence star HD 204313, located approximately 155 light years away in the constellation Capricorn. This planet orbits the star at a distance of 3.082 astronomical units and takes 1931 days or 5.29 years to revolve around the star. It has a minimum mass four times that of Jupiter. However the radius is not known since this planet was not detected by the transit method or direct imaging. Instead, this planet was detected by the radial velocity method using the CORALIE Echelle spectrograph mounted on the 1.2 meter Euler Swiss Telescope located at La Silla Observatory in Atacama desert, Chile on August 11, 2009.
Kepler-7b is one of the first five exoplanets to be confirmed by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, and was confirmed in the first 33.5 days of Kepler's science operations. It orbits a star slightly hotter and significantly larger than the Sun that is expected to soon reach the end of the main sequence. Kepler-7b is a hot Jupiter that is about half the mass of Jupiter, but is nearly 1.5 times its size; at the time of its discovery, Kepler-7b was the second most diffuse planet known, surpassed only by WASP-17b. It orbits its host star every five days at a distance of approximately 0,06 AU. Kepler-7b was announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 4, 2010. It is the first extrasolar planet to have a crude map of cloud coverage.
An exoplanet is a planet located outside the Solar System. The first evidence of an exoplanet was noted as early as 1917, but was not recognized as such until 2016; no planet discovery has yet come from that evidence. What turned out to be the first detection of an exoplanet was published among a list of possible candidates in 1988, though not confirmed until 2003. The first confirmed detection came in 1992, with the discovery of terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. The first confirmation of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star was made in 1995, when a giant planet was found in a four-day orbit around the nearby star 51 Pegasi. Some exoplanets have been imaged directly by telescopes, but the vast majority have been detected through indirect methods, such as the transit method and the radial-velocity method. As of 1 December 2023, there are 5,550 confirmed exoplanets in 4,089 planetary systems, with 887 systems having more than one planet. This is a list of the most notable discoveries.
WASP-43 is a K-type star about 284 light-years away in the Sextans constellation. It is about half the size of the Sun, and has approximately half the mass. WASP-43 has one known planet in orbit, a Hot Jupiter called WASP-43b. At the time of publishing of WASP-43b's discovery on April 15, 2011, the planet was the most closely orbiting Hot Jupiter discovered. The small orbit of WASP-43b is thought to be caused by WASP-43's unusually low mass. WASP-43 was first observed between January and May 2009 by the SuperWASP project, and was found to be cooler and slightly richer in metals than the Sun. WASP-43 has also been found to be an active star that rotates at a high velocity.
WASP-24b is a Hot Jupiter detected in the orbit of the F-type star WASP-24. The planet is approximately the same size and mass of Jupiter, but it orbits at approximately 4% of the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun every two days. WASP-24b was observed by SuperWASP starting in 2008; after two years of observations, follow-ups led to the collection of the information that led to the planet's discovery.
WASP-24 is an F-type star with the Hot Jupiter planet WASP-24b in orbit. WASP-24 is slightly larger and more massive than the Sun, it is also has a similar Metallicity and is hotter than the Sun. WASP-24 was first observed by the SuperWASP planet-searching organization, which flagged it as a potential host to a planet before following up with radial velocity and spectral measurements. Analysis of these confirmed the planetary nature of WASP-24b, which was later released to the public on the SuperWASP website.
WASP-44 is a G-type star in the constellation Cetus that is orbited by the Jupiter-size planet WASP-44b. The star is slightly less massive and slightly smaller than the Sun; it is also slightly cooler, but is more metal-rich. The star was observed by SuperWASP, an organization searching for exoplanets, starting in 2009; manual follow-up observations used WASP-44's spectrum and measurements of its radial velocity led to the discovery of the transiting planet WASP-44b. The planet and its star were presented along with WASP-45b and WASP-46b on May 17, 2011 by a team of scientists testing the idea that hot Jupiters tend to have circular orbits, an assumption that is made when the orbital eccentricity of such planets are not well-constrained.
HAT-P-33b is a planet in the orbit of HAT-P-33, which lies 1,310 light years away from Earth. Its discovery was reported in June 2011, although it was suspected to be a planet as early as 2004. The planet is about three-fourths the mass of Jupiter, but is almost eighty percent larger than Jupiter is; this inflation has, as with the discovery of similar planets WASP-17b and HAT-P-32b, raised the question of what causes these planets to become so large.
Kepler-14 is a binary star system targeted by the Kepler spacecraft. It is host to one known planet: the Jupiter-like Kepler-14b. The star system was identified by Kepler as a possible planetary host, but when imaging revealed that Kepler-14 was a binary star system and not a single star, the confirmation process became protracted. The stars are separated by at least 280 AU, and the stars complete an orbit around a common center of mass every 2800 years. Both stars are larger than the Sun. They are of similar absolute magnitudes; however, the primary star is brighter as seen from Earth.
Kepler-12b is a hot Jupiter that orbits G-type star Kepler-12 some 900 parsecs (2,900 ly) away. The planet has an anomalously large radius that could not be explained by standard models at the time of its discovery, almost 1.7 times Jupiter's size while being 0.4 times Jupiter's mass. The planet was detected by the Kepler spacecraft, a NASA project searching for planets that transit their host stars. The discovery paper was published on September 5, 2011.
The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets. The facility is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, about 2 km from ESO's Very Large Telescope and 0.5 km from the VISTA Survey Telescope. Science operations began in early 2015. The astronomical survey is managed by a consortium of seven European universities and other academic institutions from Chile, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Prototypes of the array were tested in 2009 and 2010 on La Palma, and from 2012 to 2014 at Geneva Observatory.
