Agree AFAIK. However, if we can find a magnification star / galaxy close to ourselves and aiming at a very distant star i am wondering if this will actually make it even easier with more observations of the star in question. The passing star will take longer to remove away from the background star, but not exactly sure this is purely to an advantage.

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From the mailing list:

Planet mass: 6.4 M_Jup
Semi-major axis: 0.36 AU
Period: 271.6 d

The eccentricity seems to be unconstrained. The star is also known as Van Biesbroeck's Star, GJ 752B, Wolf 1055B and V1298 Aql, NLTT 47621, Zkh 289, BD+04 4048B, LFT 1467, 8pc 170.26B, [B2006] J191657.6+050902, CSI+04 4048 2, LHS 474, UBV 16317, [GKL99] 370, CSV 102917, LSPM J1916+0509, USNO-B1.0 0951-00432259, [RHG95] 3038, GEN# +1.00180617B, LTT 15646, USNO 885, G 22-22B, and 2MASS J19165762+0509021.

Curiously a claim was made for a planet in 1983, but this was not confirmed.

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That's interesting because brown dwarfs (like stellar companions) usually have quite eccentric orbits.

It's also interesting because a ~14 Mjup planet can be expected to have a total moon mass of ~1 Earth masses (if the ratios derived from the solar systems gas giants can be applied). If we have a situation similar to the saturnian system, where nearly all the moon mass is concentrated in one large body (Titan), we could have a habitable moon (distance to G5V star = 1.13 AU) here...

WASP-16 b, another transiting planet.

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Next Thursday we will learn little more what Kepler has been doing...

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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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I have a feeling that the Thursday Kepler briefing will be an announcement of great importance. It is still early in the mission adn I think that they may have found something already.

"Terrestrial" planet possibly discovered. CoRoT-7b has been constrained to have a radius of only 1.68 +/- 0.09 R_E. Given that p=0.85 days a small gas giant would not survive long so it is likely a mostly solid body. So far the mass has only been constrained as <21M_E

Don't get overexcited... confirming a transiting terrestrial planet takes time, and Kepler hasn't been active for a long time. Guess they have found some transiting hot Jupiters, maybe even hot Neptunes. I was very excited before the first COROT press conference, and what they revealed was the discovery of a single hot Jupiter!

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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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Unconfirmed massive companion around BD+20°1790.

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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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It would be rather cold unless the BD somehow made up the difference.

I'm pleased as punch to see some Kepler results so soon...there was a time that I was sure that we'd hear nothing for at least a year after commissioning (the typical proprietary period), or worse yet not until the end of the primary mission.

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I don't trust that entry. Stellar age is given as 57 (± 23) Gyr!

The announcement: Kepler's precision is enough to detect Earth-size planets and that they have seen the reflected visible light and secondary transit of the planet HAT-7-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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Zzzzzz. The first part is just a reiteration of the design goal and HAT-7-b is an expanded super-hot Jupiter.

Okay, not earth-shattering news. But it is good to know that Kepler can do what it was designed to do. That they could produce such light curve in only a few days means we will have lots of information about the atmospheres of hot Jupiters when the mission ends... Although we have to wait till 2012 before we can know if there are other true Earth analogues, Kepler should find plenty of hot super-Earths or hot Earths before that... The biggest problem is that every discovery needs an independent confirmation, as many curves that look like planetary transits are caused by starspots, eclipsing binaries etc. They mentioned in the press conference that they already have detected hundreds of such interesting light curves. We just have to wait for their confirmation.

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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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I actually think these are really nice results!

The modulation of the light curve of a star by an extrasolar planet (plus secondary eclipse) was already shown (in two different papers) for CoRoT Exo-1b, but there, they had to stack light curve data into large time bins to reduce the errors enough to get a convincing detection (for a planet of roughly similar properties as HAT-7b).

Here, they just got it from the unbinned data, which is pretty incredible. This is going to be a brilliant mission, and astronomers will be hard-pressed to get radial velocity measurements to follow up all the possible planet candidates.

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You're right. The brightness curve for HAT-P-7 is only from 10 days of observations! Imagine how much we know about the planet after three years of observations...

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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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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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Your first link is 404: Here's a correct link:

http://exoplanet.eu/star.php?st=MOA-2008-BLG-310-L

Interesting, anyway - that's got to be the furthest confirmed extrasolar planet so far.

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There are three microlensing planets around that distance, including the cold super-Earth OGLE-05-390L b (6500 pc).

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WASP-17b, the least-dense planet currently known. It is 1.6 Saturn masses but 1.5-2 Jupiter radii, giving a density of 6-14 per cent that of Jupiter. WASP-17b is in a 3.7-day orbit around a sub-solar metallicity, V = 11.6, F6 star. Preliminary detection of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect suggests that WASP-17b is in a retrograde orbit.

Ouch... you scooped me.

A really strange planet indeed. It must have very few heavy elements and therefore a tiny core if any.

No, lots of tidal heating instead... must be tremendous if in a hot Jupiter orbit and retrograde.

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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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Sub-solar metallicity points to a small core fraction, but the expansion must be mostly due to something else. In a 3.7d orbit around an F6 star it would get plenty of stellar heat, plus the accelerated tides due to going around the star the wrong way (opposite to the star's rotation).

A bunch of massive planets in relatively distant orbits detected by CORALIE:

• Two massive planets around HD 147018
• Massive planet around HD 171238
• Also, a planet around HD 204313

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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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Yeah, I meant that.

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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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I didn't read the full article but I wonder how it's possible to detect a retrograde orbit

Edit : sorry for asking ; googling for R-McLauglin explains a lot :-)

A nice bunch of warm to cool super-Jovians around sun-like stars there, none in the HZ though. People tend to get excited whenever a Jovian in the HZ is found and start speculating about habitable moons. I think that's backwards. Habitable moons are a theoretical possibility that has so many problems they are really unlikely, so finding a gas giant in the HZ is a *bad* thing because it generally precludes Earth-like planets there.

A massive, highly eccentric planet around HD 30562.

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