Tag Archives: WASP-121

The IAU names more WASP exoplanets

The International Astronomical Union is periodically running contests to allow young people worldwide to name exoplanets, including those found by the WASP project.

Results of the 2022/23 naming process have just been announced.

The star WASP-19 is named Wattle (a genus of 1000 species of shrubs and trees native to Australia) while planet WASP-19b is Banksia (a genus of Australian wildflowers of medicinal and cultural importance to indigenous Australians).

The star WASP-43 is named Gnomon (after the astronomical instrument) while planet WASP-43b is Astrolábos (Greek for the astronomical instrument used in navigation).

The star WASP-63 is named Kosjenka while planet WASP-63b is Regoč (the names being characters in a popular Croatian fairy tale).

The star WASP-69 is named Wouri while planet WASP-69b is Makombé (being a major river in Cameroon and its tributary).

The star WASP-121 is named Dilmun (the Sumerian name of an ancient civilisation of the Bahrain archipelago) while planet WASP-121b is Tylos (the ancient Greek name for Bahrain island.).

The star WASP-166 is named Filetdor while planet WASP-166b is Catalineta (being a sea-serpent and heroine from the Mallorcan folktale “Na Filet d’Or”).

WASP-121b: another planet close to tidal destruction

WASP is particularly good at finding hot-Jupiter planets in ultra-short orbits of order 1 day, since such planets produce lots and lots of transits. WASP-121b is the latest WASP-South discovery, with an orbital period of only 1.2 days and a bloated radius of 1.9 Jupiter-radii.

Being so large and so near to its host star, the planet is close to being destroyed by tidal forces. Indeed, tides will be causing the planet’s orbit to decay, and the planet will be spiralling inwards to destruction on a time-scale of maybe only a few million years, short by astrophysical standards.

The planet is also orbiting a hot F-type star, with a surface temperature of 6500 K. This means that the side of the planet facing the star will be among the most irradiated known. This raises the possibility to detecting the heat of the planet, by watching for the occultation when it passes behind its star, half an orbit away from the transit.

Delr01

Laetitia Delrez, of the University of Liège, who leads the WASP-121b discovery paper, has used the TRAPPIST robotic telescope to look for the occultation. On seven occasions the TRAPPIST team observed the star over the expected phases, using a far-red z’-band filter to increase sensitivity to thermal radiation. They then added the lightcurves together:

WASP-121b occultation

And there it is, a dip of only 6 parts in 10,000, an impressive detection for a small 0.60-m telescope, but revealing the heat of the planet and showing that it is heated to 2400 K by the stellar irradiation.

The ready detectibility of the planet’s occultation, coupled with the fact that the host star is relatively bright star at V = 10.4, mean that WASP-121b will be a prime target for studying the make-up of its atmosphere.