SuPerPiG Observing Grid
Welcome to the home page of the SuPerPiG Observing Grid! SuPerPiG stands for Short Period Planets Group, an international group of scientists committed to studying short period exoplanets, like Hot Jupiters, via transit observations.
What is a Hot Jupiter? It is a type of exoplanet that is SO CLOSE to its host star it’s orbital period (the time it takes to complete an orbit) is less than 4 Earth days! These exoplanets have a variety of interesting characteristics caused by this proximity. Most excitingly, they are strong candidates for orbital decay, which is another way of saying they are slowly spiraling into their host star and on the path to disintegration. We call these DOOMED WORLDS, for more watch Dr. Elisabeth Adam’s talk from our First Friday Astronomy series.
We need YOUR HELP!
We are looking for motivated teachers from our Telescopes for Teachers program to join our observing grid and help us collect transit data for short period exoplanets! Space based missions such as TESS, require many follow-up observations of planetary candidates to understand more about what other worlds are out there. Members of the Observing Grid would be helping to complete these observations in order to update orbital periods, detect false positive planet candidates, and contribute to a growing database of potentially doomed worlds.