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Gas-rich Qatar has been snapping up prime real estate across the world for several years now, most notably Harrods in London and the Raffles hotel in Singapore. Now it’s grasping further afield – in outer space.
In collaboration with western universities, the Gulf emirate claims to have discovered a "new alien world” that has fittingly been named Qatar-1b. The ‘hot-Jupiter’ type planet was discovered through photos taken by Qatar-funded wide-angle cameras located in New Mexico.
The planet was analysed by the Qatar Foundation – an entity sponsored by Sheikha Mozah, the influential wife of the Qatari emir – and astronomers from the universities of St Andrews, Leicester and Keele in Britain, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, according to a statement from the Foundation.
Khalid Al Subai, leader of the Qatar exoplanet survey and a research director at the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, said:
Qatar is proud to contribute to the search for planets around other stars. The discovery of Qatar-1b is a great achievement – one that further demonstrates Qatar’s commitment to becoming a leader in innovative science and research.
The discovery of Qatar-1b marks the beginning of a new era of collaborative astrophysics research between Qatar, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The Qatar Foundation is primarily a vehicle for Qatar’s investments in domestic culture health and education projects. These include the Doha Debates, a televised forum aired by the BBC, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, the Qatar Science and Technology Park and Education City. Overall, the country has pledged to allocate 2.6 per cent of its rapidly expanding gross domestic product annually to science and research.
Though often overshadowed by larger or bolshier neighbours, Qatar is also keen to make its mark on the global stage. It recently won a bid to host the World Cup in 2022, and the Qatar Foundation has entered into a €170m ($225m) shirt sponsorship deal with Barcelona, the stellar football team.
The country’s name could go further still. "Qatar-1b is just the beginning,” says St Andrews astronomer Prof. Keith Horne. "With Qatar’s new planet-hunting cameras, we should soon be finding smaller planets as well, hot Saturns and hot Neptunes, and ultimately, with a different technique, cool Earths.”
Only a fool would bet against the Qataris swiftly snapping up some prime real estate in any Earth-like planets out there. Given its outsize ambitions but small size – the peninsula is smaller than Yorkshire in England – it could do with some more land.