Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes
La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain

Contact:
Javier Méndez, Public Relations Officer
jma @ ing.iac.es

8th November, 2007

SuperWASP Finds a Strongly-Irradiated Transiting Gas-Giant Exoplanet

The WASP and SOPHIE collaboration has announced the discovery of WASP-3b,
one of the hottest exoplanets discovered so far. At a temperature of more
than 1700 degrees Celsius WASP-3b has the potential to place stringent
constraints on exoplanet atmospheric models.

The first transits of WASP-3b were detected by the SuperWASP cameras in
the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma. The transits were then
confirmed by the IAC80 telescope in Izaña Observatory, Tenerife, as part
of the Canarian Observatories' International Time Programme for 2007, and
by the University of Keele 60-cm telescope. The discovery confirmation,
using the radial velocity method, came from data obtained with the SOPHIE
spectrograph on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence's 1.93m telescope.

Observations made with the adaptive-optics system NAOMI+INGRID on the
William Herschel Telescope were used to exclude the possibility of a
nearby eclipsing-binary system being the cause of the transits. WASP-3,
the host star, lies at approximately 220 parsecs or 720 light years and no
companion stars were found to lie within 45 astronomical units of WASP-3.

WASP-3b has a mass of 1.6-1.8 Jupiter masses and it transists its host
star every 1.8 days, one of the shortest orbital periods yet discovered.
The finding of Jupiter-mass planets around other stars supports the idea
that Earth-sized planets can also form and be detected as astronomers'
technology improves.

The Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) is the first team to detect
planets in both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere using the transit
method, and it is also the most ambitious project in the world designed to
discover large planets. WASP-3b is the third exoplanet discovered by WASP
in the North. The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes is a member of the WASP
consortium.

More information:

* D. Pollacco, et. al., 2007, WASP-3b: a strongly-irradiated transiting
gas-giant planet, arXiv:0711.0126v1 [astro-ph].
http://es.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0126

* Three New Planets Announced by UK's Planet Hunters, STFC press release,
31st October, 2007.
http://www.scitech.ac.uk/PMC/PRel/STFC/wasp.aspx

* Detectado uno de los planetas extrasolares más calientes, IAC press
release, 8th November, 2007.
http://www.iac.es/divulgacion.php?op1=16&id=488

* SuperWASP web site.
http://www.superwasp.org/

IMAGE CAPTION:
[http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/press/plane...olar_a_01s.jpg (28KB)]
WASP-3b is one of hottest extrasolar planets ever detected. Credit: Artist
impression by IAC's multimedia service.