The image (yuck!) is SpaceRef.com's own graphics and has nothing to do with the original announcement. The news briefing is a teleconference, but the audio will be streamed live nonetheless.

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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

It was only a common heliochromological dig from a volunteer heliochromologist.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The mean of five measures each of which is not worth a dang (sinc), has a maximum value of only five dangs (sinc)". Heber Curtis

"(sinc)" - spelling is not correct (in its orginal form) :)

I think it will be some more infos about HD 154345

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"The more I study the Universe, the more I see a Superior Intelligence's project in it"

Albert Einstein

"Barnard's Star is "clean" (poor van de Kamp!)"

Well no....it is "Clean" of a high mass planet.

But any planet of 3 Earth masses or less at 1-AU is possible.

So - until we have better instruments one cannot assume Barnard's Star has no planetary companion.

BTW - whats with the 1989-94 "discoveries" (assumed that is what the table above implies). Pretty sure the Pulsar planets were the first ones discovered 95? 96?.

1992

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

family of five planets

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...planet-system/

55 Cancri is getting really crowded...

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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

At the time of the discovery of the fourth planet (that was also big news) the orbits of the two outer ones were believed to be much more eccentric. Now as they've got more data, it appears that all the planets orbit in almost circular orbits (except the new one, but it's within error bars). They're not "decent" gas giants in the sense that they orbit much closer than they should, but still...

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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

The fifth one was suspected for some time now. I guess this is just the confirmation announcement. There's another five set suspected in another system's dataset, I suppose simply unconfirmed as of yet.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

The discoverers mention in their paper that additional planets of similar or larger mass between the planets f and d can easily avoid detection if they're in resonant orbits.

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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

There's a pretty impressive gap in the current system layout. It wouldn't overly surprise me to find out there are at least two more planets in there somewhere.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I had already placed a fictional terrestrial planet (Danzig) in that space for the Orion's Arm scenario, so I've had to make that planet a moon of 55 Cancri f.

Here is the new moon in orbit around the f planet.
http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/2995/danzigiy4.png

A moon in this location could conceivably be habitable, although it would be tidally locked.

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

Is there enough there to test Bode's Law?

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There is a growing tendancy to think of Man as a rational, thinking being, which is absurd.- Marvin the Martian.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Excellent. This is the confirmation Systemic Console is a great program to find additional exoplanets before they're detected and confirmed.

Next: Mu Arae's fifth planet?

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"The more I study the Universe, the more I see a Superior Intelligence's project in it"

Albert Einstein

Actually, there's another HDXXXXXXX named star with four knowns too. To be honest, I haven't been overly taken with multiplanet systems since the Upsilon Andromedae system was announced.

When they break the eight planet threshold or come up aces with an Earth mass terrestrial (not a pulsar planet ), I don't care where in the system it flies, gimme a call.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Enough where? If you mean among observed exoplanets, no.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I meant in 55 Cancri but I suppose your answer covers that.

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There is a growing tendancy to think of Man as a rational, thinking being, which is absurd.- Marvin the Martian.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

You mean HD 160691? That star has a Bayer designation which happens to be Mu Arae.

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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

[edit] Yup, that's the one.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I've made images of all the (known) planets in the 55 Cancri system now, using Celestia, the Sudarsky classification system and a bit imagination (which in my case is the least reliable part).

Here is the 'f' planet, with an imaginary Earth-like moon; it is a class II planet, with thick water vapour. This is different to the image I posted earlier, which was too blue. I based the earlier image on this picture which is probably much too blue.

Here is the 'e' planet, which is probably hot enough to have clouds of silicate vapour in the atmosphere. I've imagined that such a planet might look a little yellowish- this might not be correct, but the planet's clouds might have all sorts of impurities that give it colour.

Here is the next planet out, 'b', , which is not hot enough to have silicate clouds, but too hot for water clouds (Sudarsky class III). Such a planet would probably be mostly given colour by Rayleigh scattering- the same process which makes our sky blue.

The next planet, 'c', is cool enough for water clouds, (Sudarsky class II) although I've added a lot of blue to the default Celestia texture to suggest that it is quite hot.

The outermost planet known so far, 'd',, is probably a Sudarsky class I planet, like Saturn or Jupiter. Obviously there is a lot of variation within these classes, as Saturn and Jupiter look very different to me, but they both have the distintive yellowish cast of a Class I planet.

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson, who has sorted these planets into classes for Celestia users (although I've adapted the textures somewhat).

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

Good job! That's really cool!

No Great Red Spots though!

New transiting planet:

• Lupus-TR-3: m = 0.81 M_J, r = 0.89 R_J, a = 0.0464 AU, p = 3.91405 d

It could be a blend by a background eclipsing binary star but that seems unlikely.

The parent star's apparent magnitude is feeble M_V = 17.4! That's even less than in the case of the OGLE stars and unfortunate since that makes studying the planet very challenging.

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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

A paper just came out yesterday on the astrophysics preprint archive which discusses the past, present, and future of planetary microlensing searches. Here is the title and author: Microlensing Searches for Planets: Results and Future Prospects B. Scott Gaudi Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University

According to the author, the number of extrasolar planets found via microlensing has been increasing even if the results have not been published, yet. Specifically, he said: "With the recent MOA upgrade, the rate of planet detections has increased substantially. From 2003-2006, six planets were detected (four have been published). From the 2007 bulge season alone, there are four fairly secure planetary events. This rate can be expected to increase modestly as analysis techniques improve, and so the next several years should bring of order a dozen planet detections."

Microlensing searches already strongly suggest that at least a third of the galaxy's single M stars have ~10 Me worlds between 1 and 4 A.U. These new discoveries should help shrink the large error bars associated with this statistic. After decades of ignorance and speculation, we are making great strides toward pinning down the value of Fp in the Drake equation.

OGLE finds its seventh transiting planet, an inflated one:

• OGLE-TR-211: P = 3.6772 d, m = 1.03 M_J, r = 1.36 R_J

This means that 50% of transiting planets have been found this year alone (17 of 34). This also proves that the transiting method has matured and one should expect that the number of transiting planets increases rapidly. There is one problem, however: planet candidates must be confirmed using the radial velocity method because brown dwarfs and even smallest red dwarfs are planet-sized. Lack of available follow-up time is a serious hindrance.

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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

A new planet around Kappa Coronae Borealis b

And a possible additional planet in HD 177830 system from Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets:

Planet's parameters are:

HD 177830 c

Period: 111.59 days
Mass: 0.18 Jupiter masses
Eccentricity: 0.27
Average separation: 0.59 AUs

And eccentricity for planet b has been edited with 0.046.
This means: another Hot Neptune.

Moreover this means probable discoveries via Systemic Console may anticipate Exoplanets' detections. Take a look.

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"The more I study the Universe, the more I see a Superior Intelligence's project in it"

Albert Einstein

My discovery about planet discovery: JPL Planet Quest: New Worlds Atlas.

Has this been around a while or is it something new? JPL seems to be promoting it as a new multimedia tool.

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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 ...

The site is old but it was updated recently.

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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

News from a reliable source: the CoRoT team will publish its first results on December 20.

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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 hope. Rumors was about December 10 and I wait for nothing. Bummer.

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Sanity is overrated.
Butterfly.

December 10 date was a misunderstanding. The project had a meeting, but it was not a press meeting.

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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