A top Northern Ireland scientist is leading efforts to locate evidence of life on planets throughout the universe.

In 1995, astronomers found the first planet orbiting another star like the sun.

Since then, over 300 new worlds have been found around other stars.

One of the leaders in this field is Dr Don Pollacco, of the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Along with other UK astronomers, he developed and built the SuperWASP instrument located on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

SuperWASP is a suite of cameras that measures the brightness of millions of stars every night and looks for the tell-tale ‘wink’ in the brightness of a star as another planet moves in front of it.

While simple in concept, the difficulty was developing a fully robotic system that can automatically take pictures of millions of stars and search them for the faint signal of an orbiting planet.

SuperWASP now leads the world in this technique — it has so far discovered 15 planets, and more are on the way.

Dr Pollacco said: “Our planets are especially valuable as we can determine their exact size and mass.

We want to understand how these planets came into existence and what their future is likely to be

“At Queen’s, we are developing programmes not only to characterise their properties and look for bodies in these systems, but also to understand how these planets came into existence and even what their future is likely to be.”

Almost all of the planets discovered so far are similar to the giant planet Jupiter.

Now, in the International Year of Astronomy, astronomers are focussing their attention on finding planets like the earth.

March this year sees the launch of NASA’s Kepler satellite.

This telescope will use the same technique as SuperWASP, but being above the earth’s atmosphere means it is likely to detect a few small earth-sized planets.

At the same time, the European Space Agency (ESA) is |expecting to launch its own satellite in 2017, to be called PLATO.

Dr Pollacco is the lead scientist in the effort to design |and launch this €450M ESA mission.

PLATO is not only designed to find many planets similar to our own, but for those that are near enough to us, the biggest telescopes back on earth will be able to take images of the planets directly.

Dr Pollacco and his team in Belfast will be able to examine their properties in great detail, and in principle even evidence for life in their atmospheres — the stuff of science fiction.