Simple 'scopes finding planets

Astronomers using telescopes not much larger than the spyglass Galileo wielded 400 years ago have discovered a new Jupiter-size planet orbiting a bright, distant star.

It is the first planet to be discovered by an international network of astronomers using telescopes no larger than those sold at Wal-Mart for the same price as an iPod.

"This portends a new era in planet hunting," said Geoff Marcy of the University of California-Berkeley, whose team has discovered nearly 60 new planets but was not involved in this survey.

It was only a decade ago that the world's most sophisticated telescopes with mirrors more than 30 feet across were beginning to notice celestial hints — a star's wiggle here, a brief dimming there — that planets orbit stars far beyond our solar system.

Now telescopes with optics just 4 inches wide are scanning the heavens for signs of these new worlds. The instruments are custom-built, but they use some commercially available parts also found in department store telescopes that cost a few hundred dollars.

Still, the discovery suggests it won't be long before the hunt is joined by backyard astronomers armed with off-the-shelf equipment, loads of time and enough caffeine to stay awake. Just last winter a Kentucky man in his back yard found a new nebula, or star nursery, that had been overlooked by scientists at major observatories.

"You might think that you need a big telescope to do this, but that's not really true," said Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Torres is one of 12 astronomers from six institutions that collaborated to find the new planet. Details are online in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"The follow-up work requires very specialized techniques, so this is something that most people couldn't buy in a shop and do right away," Torres said. "But the hardware is fairly simple."

Other planet hunters say the small telescopes' success is "quite significant" because it makes the search cheaper and simpler, which could accelerate the pace of planet discoveries.

"But you still need automated telescopes to really cut down the operating costs," said University of Texas astronomer William Cochran, who recently spotted a new planet using the Hobby-Eberly Observatory in west Texas, which combines 91 hexagonal mirrors to form a light-gathering surface 30 feet across.