The Little Scope That Could

Usually when we read about fascinating astronomical discoveries, they are made by very large telescopes. Sometimes it's a single large lens, like the Mount Palomar observatory, and sometimes it's by an array of several telescopes that "see" in radio waves or other portions of the spectrum than visible light.

But the discovery of two planets, a weird one in the constellation Andromeda and a fairly normal one in Auriga, was made by the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) North, which is of course in southern Arizona.

KELT North and KELT South were specifically designed to view wide portions of the sky and their smaller lenses mean they can look at very bright stars and see details that larger telescopes lose in the brightness. Any variation in the brightness may mean that astronomers are viewing a star with a planet orbiting it.

The Andromeda planet may have been a failed star -- it's so close to its star that it's year is only thirty hours long and it weathers thousands of times the stellar radiation we're used to. The heat, radiation and other conditions mean it is more or less a ball of metallic hydrogen -- that's the lightest gas known, acting as dense as a metal.

Scientists noted that as expected at such a short distance, the planet is "tidally locked" with its star. Like the moon, its periods of rotation and revolution match up so that only one side faces the star. But because the planet is itself so large, it exerts its gravity on the star and has tidally locked the star to itself.

So bravo to the little telescope that could, for finding what may be the galaxy's most intense staring contest.