Supervisor : Dr Matt Burleigh (mbu@star.le.ac.uk)

Details of Project

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a wide-field photometric survey designed to discover transiting extra-solar planets of Neptune-size and smaller around bright stars (magnitude V<13). It is being built at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site, home of the Very Large Telescope, in the Atacama desert in Chile. The project is a British-led partnership involving the Universities of Leicester, Warwick and Queen's Belfast, together with the Observatoire de Geneve in Switzerland, the German Aerospace Agency (DLR),  and the Universidad Catolica de Chile. 

NGTS will employ an array of twelve fully-robotic small (12 inch)telescopes, maximising sensitivity to bright but relatively small host stars (K and early-M spectral type), achieving a photometric accuracy of just 1 milli-mag. The hot Neptunes and super-Earths it finds will be prime targets for the next generation of instruments and telescopes designed to study the properties of the planets and their atmospheres, eg HARPS-North, the European-Extremely Large Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

NGTS builds on the hardware and software heritage from the SuperWASP telescopes in South Africa and on La Palma. Since 2004 they have discovered more transiting extra-solar planets of Jupiter size (>70) than any other ground-based experiment to date. The data from SuperWASP is processed and archived at Leicester, as will be the data from NGTS. 

Construction of NGTS will begin in early 2012, with commissioning and the first observations taking place in late 2012 and early 2013.

We would like to recruit an enthusiastic and passionate student to work with the Leicester NGTS team on commissioning and subsequently analysing and exploiting data from the survey. The student will be supervised jointly by Dr Matt Burleigh and Dr Mike Goad, and will also work closely with the designer of the Data Management System, Dr Richard West.

Prototype Hardware for NGTS. Credit: Burleigh

As well as identifying new transiting planets, follow-up observations will be required to; confirm the identifications; measure the radii and masses more precisely;  characterise their atmospheres and undertake long-term monitoring for evidence of multiple planets systems and moons. 
We have access to a new, robotically-controlled 1m telescope which has been built on la Palma in the Canaries to undertake some of these follow-up observations. A student working with the NGTS team will also be able to apply for time for follow-up observations on facilities such as the VLT and the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Background Reading