The planet has been named Qatar-1b and its discovery is to be reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development said on Wednesday.
“We feel proud that one of our citizens, in collaboration with his foreign colleagues was able to discover a new planet which holds the name of our beloved country — Qatar,” said Nasser Al-Meer, a Qatari citizen.
“Historically, Arabs are pioneers in astronomy. So we will not be surprised when one of their successors discover a new planet,” he added.
“It is a wonderful initiative,” said Ahmed Al-Sheeb, another Qatari. “I hope all young people in our country would follow in the footsteps of this Qatari astronomer in acquiring more knowledge,” he added.
“The discovery of Qatar-1b is a great achievement — one that further demonstrates Qatar’s commitment to becoming a leader in innovative science and research,” said Khalid Al-Subai, leader of the Qatar exoplanet survey and a research director of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.
“This discovery marks the beginning of a new era of collaborative astrophysics research between Qatar, the UK and the US,” he added.
Al-Subai teamed with scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and other institutions to make the discovery.
Professor Keith Horne of St. Andrews University in Scotland, which collaborated in the research, said that using the same technology the team hoped eventually to find planets more similar to our own.
“Qatar-1b is just the beginning,” Horne said. “With Qatar’s new planet-hunting cameras, we should soon be finding smaller planets as well, hot Saturns and hot Neptunes, and, ultimately, with a different technique, cool Earths.”
To find the new world, Qatar’s wide-angle cameras (located in New Mexico) took images of the sky every clear night beginning in early 2010. The photographs then were transmitted to the UK for analysis by collaborating astronomers at St. Andrews and Leicester Universities and Qatar. That analysis narrowed the field to a few hundred stars.
Qatar-1b circles its star once every 1.4 days, meaning that its “year” is just 34 hours long. It also spins on its axis once every 34 hours as it is expected to be tidally locked with its star, such that one side of the planet always faces the star.
