Qatar survey to search for new planets

By Joseph Varghese

Staff Reporter

Qatar will set up new observatories in countries in Asia, Europe and America for the exploration of space and discovery of new planets, a senior official has said.

Khalid al-Subai, director of Research Co-ordination and Compliance in the Research and Development Division of Qatar Foundation, told Gulf Times that he had recently won two cash awards, totalling $6mn from Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). “The first award of $5mn is meant for conducting further research in discovering new planets and the second worth $1mn is for promoting awareness about astronomy in Qatar and the region.”

The first award, under the category of “exceptional programmes”, will be used for Qatar’s Exoplanet Survey which aims to discover new planets.

Al-Subai, Qatar’s first professional astronomer, said: “We are going to make use of this grant for searching new planets from stations spread over three continents. We already have an observatory in New Mexico. In addition, we will set up one more station in New Mexico, one in Canary Islands and another one in India or Iraq.”

He said the survey would enable scientists to find more planets at a faster rate.

Al-Subai said the expanded survey needed more human requirements. “Right now we are only a few members and we need to increase the strength of the team to cope up with the large amount of data from the three new centres. There are only three professional astronomers and we need at least seven. We will be hiring more people soon.”

As for the different stages of exploration, al-Subai observed that the first phase of the activities included setting up of the observing stations. “We will make sure remotely that the observatories are working properly without much human interference,” he said.

“They will be connected through the Internet which allows us to monitor their work. The second phase will be the process for filtering all the noise and getting proper signals. The stations will be linked to each other through computer codes to make sure that we get what we are looking for.”

According to al-Subai, during the third phase, the scientists will confirm whether the discoveries are genuine planets after consultations with the partners. “In the fourth phase, the scientists will process and study the findings, characterise it and publish the discovery.”

He said the award provided scope for sponsoring two Qatari graduate students for PhD programme for a period of five years. Al-Subai revealed that the astronomy study programme has been placed as a department under the Qatar Energy and Environment Research Institute (QEERI) a month ago .

“This is an incubatory phase for us. Once we have enough staff and infrastructure, we will be separated from QEERI.”

Since 2010, al-Subai’s team has discovered three Jupiter-like planets and named them Qatar-1b, Qatar-2b and Qatar-2c. He said: “I could have stopped after these discoveries but I want to inspire the young people of Qatar to take up this science.” Page 36