Nuffield Bursary project - Observing exoplanets

Rui Wang (2009) and Ashleigh Dabell (2010) carried out their Nuffield Bursary placement at the NTU observatory during July and August. Their project was to study the variation of light from a star (e.g. HD18733) that is orbited by an exo-planet. The results they obtained modelled and determined the change in the brightness of the star caused by the exo-planet.

Rui calculated that this exo-planet is 20% of the size of the star it was orbiting, which makes it approximately twice the size of Jupiter. Ashleigh developed a mathematical model that she managed to fit to Rui’s data.