Sunday night, MINERVA bagged its first planet. Jon Swift used Penn State’s T1 sitting in Pasadena, CA to observe WASP-12b:
From exoplanets.org, the literature values from Maciejewski et al. (2011) and Hebb et al. (2009) compare very well to these values:
b: 0.375 +/- 0.0455 (within 1 sigma)
R/R* : 0.138 +/- 0.00016 (within 1 sigma of T1 value)
duration: 2.928 +/- 0.024 (5 sigma discrepancy)
stellar density: 0.44 +/- 0.06 (within 1 sigma)
Of course, we plan on doing this with radial velocities in the future, but for now it’s nice to see that the telescope works.
Woo-hoo!
Congratulations to the entire team, this is a beautiful result !
Keep up the good work !
David
CTIO