Patience Pays Off: Student Discovers Planets

Michelle Kunimoto, a student at the University of British Columbia, recently discovered four new exoplanets about 3,200 light years away - one close to Mercury in size, two somewhat larger that the Earth, and a fourth closer in size to Neptune.  Ms. Kunimoto is a recent graduate from UBC where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy.

How did she do it?  A part of her research as a student, Ms. Kunimoto was studying data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which contained observations of about 150,000 stars. She noticed something odd with one of the stars but it has been missed because of the exoplanets long orbit - 637 days. While Kepler has found other exoplanets with longer orbits, it appears more planets such as these could be in the data for discovery.

In fact, it was this time last year that a high school student in England was credited with finding a Jupiter-sized exoplanet 1,000 light years away. He was looking at data collected by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project at Keele University in England, which uses an approach similar to the Kepler Space Telescope.

So the data is out there. Now we simply need more industrious (and patient) students to sort through it. 

Image: UBC student Michelle Kunimoto (right) and astronomy professor Jaymie Matthews (left). Martin Dee/UBC