We're living interesting times indeed...

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Three massive Jovians around bright orange giants:

• 14 Andromedae b
• 6 Lyncis b
• 81 Ceti b

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Has this been mentioned here before? Seems to be old news...

Solar System's 'look-alike' found

Very old news. He suggests that there very well "could" be other stars out there that "might" host terrestrial planets..

Exciting, but let's not get too optimistic on this. Maybe it is smaller than most other exoplanets but not something that will be mentioned in the news (an exoplanet that was great news a year or two years ago) or it could simply be a mistaking (i guess those kind of things still happens and the non-existing exoplanet keeps 'its' name).

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"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." (Ernest Hemmingway)

Corot-Exo-4b has a 9 day period around a star similar to the Sun (though they did not say its color ), AND the rotation rate matches the orbital period! It ain't that big a planet for a tidal lock. This one is quite interesting, right?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

I think that's CoRot. The star is F0V. The period and the rotation are given as 9.20205 +/- 0.00037 and 8.87 +/- 1.12 days respectively, so synchronicity is not a lock.

Yet!

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Thanks, I took the article too literally.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Interesting in what way? Do you consider planets with tidal lock more likely to have life than other planets? Guess almost tidal locked planets are even more unlikely to have life than tidal locked planets.

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"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." (Ernest Hemmingway)

That the planet is tidally locked to the star is an assumption; that the star is tidally locked to the planet is the observation (close enough), and it is the latter that is remarkable.

Ah ok, didn't read that the first time. Yes, that sounds interesting.

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"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." (Ernest Hemmingway)

Looks like the detection was spurious. The RV signal can be explained by starspots which are abundant in young and magnetically active stars like TW Hya.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

I'm sick of gas giants being discovered yearly. Don't get me wrong, I really like gas giants because they are usually gorgeous. But I'm just more interested in terrestrial planets - as, I'm sure, you all are. Is there any possibility that the Kepler Telescope discovers more rocky planets orbiting distant stars?

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"Science is physics and astronomy." -Me
"There is absolutely no law in physics that prevents time travel." -Dr. Michio Kaku

^
Undoubtedly; I'm hoping Kepler will scoop COROT on this point, all the more so for being more optimised for planetary transit photometry.

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strong evidence for a mass 8.4 Mearth planet, in a quasi-circular orbit and at the period of 8.78 days around Gliese 176. Not that interesting for exobiologists: a=0.066, L=0.022 so it receives over 5 times the starlight that Earth does.

@ Fiery Phoenix
I might be wrong, but i have an idea that most if not all exoplanet hunters are now looking for other planets than just regular gas giants. Most of them are probably searching areas where we could find Earth 2 whilst others are looking for planets that may be different than Earth but in the Green Zone. Some are looking for the greatest gas giant to find the distinction between gas giants and brown dwarfs and some are searching for all types of planets in a star system already known to find the maximum number of planets in one solar system. All of these exoplanet hunters have one thing in common - they all find gas giants more or less by accident while searching for their particular interesting exoplanets. But when they find one of these planets they don't just leave it for good but spend time to find out as much as possible anyway.

Can't say i know this is how it's done for sure, but that's the idea i've always had.

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"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." (Ernest Hemmingway)

You're probably correct. I would say the same thing. They basically just happen to come across the gas giants while searching for a second Earth - more or less. Anyway, the Kepler mission is on the way.

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Apparently, two new exoplanets were just discovered:

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

The count was 307 just yesterday; now it's 309. Also, the star count was 263, and now it's 265. Which means the new planets were discovered around two different stars. No articles/pictures yet, though.

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"Science is physics and astronomy." -Me
"There is absolutely no law in physics that prevents time travel." -Dr. Michio Kaku

BA Blog: Astronomers find a planet denser than lead

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

If a science fiction author had written about a planet with these properties, I would have dismissed it as being too far-fetched.

It just goes to show that the universe really is stranger than we can imagine...

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The HATNet's tenth planet, HAT-10 b, turns out to be same as WASP-11 b. The teams have agreed to call it WASP-11 b/HAT-10 b.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
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There are hints of dozens of planets with masses < 50 Earth masses detected by the HARPS instrument. 40+ of them have a mass < 30 Me, in the hot Neptune/super-Earth territory.

In addition, COROT seems to have found a planet with a radius of < 2 Earth radii. Could be the first transiting super-Earth if it is confirmed. Though it would be weird if they don't have more such candidates, they should already have...

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

As I already commented there...

This sounds like something out of a Niven story. How about a gas planet with a mini neutron star in its core? (Yeah, I know, physics will be against me on that one, just thinking of alternate scenarios than the same density all the way through...)

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@ Kullat Nunu
Do you have a link where you've read something about this planet? How far are we from a confirmation date?



And BTW: Has anyone ever made a calculation of which planet is the smallest of those in the Green Zone? I would like to see the record of that one.

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"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." (Ernest Hemmingway)

Steinn Sigurðsson's the Dynamics of Cats is the best source for exoplanet gossiping.

You mean habitable zone? Some of those super-Earths/hot Neptunes are near or withing their stars' habitable zone. But those stars are all red dwarfs. Smallest planets orbiting Sun-like stars in a habitable zone are Jovians.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Which of course begs the question, how many habitable moons have we already in our catalogues and we don't know it yet, because the only data we can currently get is in the Jovians they orbit?

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Thx, but could you give me a more direct link to the page you've read that article about the exoplanet gossip on?

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Zero, because the moons aren't in the catalog. What is on the catalog are planets, their orbits, and the radii and effective temperatures of their stars. From these I find nine planets with bolometric illumination within 15% of Earth's

I think we were talking past each other. Guess Drunk Vegan meant that by the planets we have found it is very likely that there are moons out there, and looking at the sizes of the planets i would say that there probably are Earth-sized moons in orbit around them. However, there are probably too much magnatic force around those great planets that life on the moons have a hard time - but that's when life adapts or extinct

Oh yes, bolometric illumination, that was the word i forgot since my time at the University Did you do that math yourself or do you have a link for that page? I would really like to see such a overview with bolometric illumination.

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