How many exoplanets would you guess CoRoT might introduce? [I want 4. ]

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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) :)

And now for something completely different:

• GD 66b, the first extrasolar planet around a white dwarf (m = 2.11 M_J, a = 2.356 AU, p = 1650 d, e = 0).

The discovery was based on the timing of stellar oscillations. Yet another method based on the Doppler effect.

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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

That's cool. Here's Fergal Mullally and team's, power point presentation. It shows how the orbital inclination is obtainable, too. [I like the more appropriate blue color for the white dwarf, too. ]

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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) :)

You got one.

A hot Jupiter, but not as typical as it seems. It is unusually massive (3.53 M_J) for such a large planet (1.429 R_J).

Let's hope the CoRoT team gets lots of observation time to conduct RV confirmations...

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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

Now this is interesting... a 8-10 million years old hot Jupiter around the low-mass star TW Hydrae (Space.com article). The system is so young that the protoplanetary disk has not yet evaporated. Youngest planetary system by the factor of over 10.

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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

So much for my simplified extrapolation. It predicted 62 exoplanet discoveries for 2007, and we only had 61.

Another Wow moment! I wonder if it is migrating.

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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) :)

Looks like it's already migrated. It orbits ten times closer than Mercury's distance from the sun.

Yes, and there is evidence it has partially cleared the protoplanetary disk in the process. The discovery of TW Hya b is a major one.

It is also good to know that the mass 9.8 M_J is the actual mass of the planet, based on the reasonable assumption that the planet orbits at the same plane as the protoplanetary disk. The inclination of the disk is 7°, which means we see it almost face-on.

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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 am curious if there is still enough disk remaining to degrade its orbit, or if there is enough T-Tauri like tantrums that would cause migration, or both. At such an early age for the system, perhaps migration is likely.

[V838 Mon comes to mind ever since Cress et. al. proposed, in their paper, the idea that the flashes (light echos) may have been caused by planetary plunges into the star.]

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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) :)

Maybe it didn't migrate at all or very little.

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You ain't nobody 'til you've been banned.

Yes, that would seem possible.

If it is migrating, could we not detect it over a few year span?

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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) :)

Current scientific thinking is that it is impossible for a gas giant to form so class to its star. As for seeing it migrate, I'm pretty sure that migrations takes a long time by human standards.

A decaded ago, before the extrasolar planets were discovered, then current scientific thinking said all gas giants should be outside the ice line and movies like Star Wars, which had a gas giant inside the life zone, was mere fantasy...

I'd hold off on this scientific thinking and wonder just how biased we are.

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All moderations in purple.

You ain't nobody 'til you've been banned.

The only difference between then and now is that we've discovered that planets can and do migrate. There is still good reason to think that giants form outside the "ice line".

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

How true Yogi's malaprop, "you can see a lot by just looking". The bigger the scopes, the bigger the looks, then we'll see!

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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) :)

Seems as if I read this a while back, but it's dated today. Apologies if it's shown up already - couldn't find the instance if so:

Exoplanet reflected light detected for the first time

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

AAS News

USA Today: Faraway planets collided, merged into one (from Space.com)

Horse's mouth: CfA press release: When Worlds Collide: Have Astronomers Observed the Aftermath of a Distant Planetary Collision?

Here's an artist's concept, but won't someone please make the CG animation of this?

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Man, 20 yrs ago, exoplanets were all in the province of sci-fi. Now, we're finding new worlds on a semi-regular basis. How long will it be till we snap a photo of some alien planet, and catch a glint of light off SOMEBODY ELSE'S camera lens?

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

That will take a very long time. I would guess thousands of years.

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Forming opinions as we speak

...or our understanding of very low-mass objects such as this is incomplete.

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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

AAS News

University of Arizona press release: Astronomers are First to Successfully Predict Extra-Solar Planet

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Accounting for velocity jitters in planet search surveys (arXiv.org, submitted on 22 Dec 2007)

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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

AAS News

Not a new planet, just a program.

University of Florida News: UF-led search for new planets part of ambitious new sky survey

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The drought ends with a bang...

• OGLE-2006-BLG-109Lbc, the first double planet system detected using the gravitational lensing method. Orbital and physical parameters of the two planets resemble Jupiter and Saturn. Both are slightly smaller and closer to their star, but because the star is much dimmer than the Sun, the planets have temperatures similar to our familiar gas giants. Maybe not a coincidence.

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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 Times had a fairly good writeup of the latest OGLE results:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/sc...15planets.html

Three new planets around orange K giant stars:

• 18 Delphini b
• HD 81688 b
• xi Aquilae b

They all are massive, 2.7 - 10.3 times as massive as Jupiter, and they all orbit in circular, medium-distance orbits between 0.68 AU and 2.8 AU. The stars they orbit are medium-mass, 2.1 - 2.3 times as massive as the Sun. Planets around such stars don't seem to be rare¹, but it seems that if there are short orbit planets, they're exceedingly rare. Of course, a true "hot Jupiter" analog would be consumed when its parent star expands; still, there's plenty of room unoccupied.

¹ Note that all medium-mass stars that are known to have planets are orange giants, which is a stable period in the life of such stars. When they're younger like Sirius, the radial velocity method can't be used because the stars tend to rotate fast which blur spectral lines.

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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 can't wait until the Esa's Darwin and Nasa's Kepler are going operational. A totaly new world will open I think. There are most likely billions of exoplanets. And a number of them will orbit in the habitable zone.

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All about space related topics: http://www.spacestart.eu

Kepler will be extremely welcome indeed, but I wouldn't get too excited about Darwin just yet, if I were you. As things stand, it's shaping up to be a very long wait.

Update
Nearest star's wobbles could reveal Earth's twin
05:08 29 February 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Stephen Battersby
European planet hunters on brink of Earth-sized prize
Alpha Centauri lies just over 4 light years away and is the closest star system to the Sun. It appears to be a triple system, with two Sun-like stars orbiting each other relatively closely (about 23 times the Earth-Sun distance). The two stars have high concentrations of heavy elements, which is characteristic of stars that are born surrounded by dusty, planet-forming discs.

From:http://space.newscientist.com/articl...rths-twin.html

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All about space related topics: http://www.spacestart.eu

A new transiting planet:

• HAT-7b: An extremely hot massive planet transiting a bright star in the Kepler field.

The abstract says that the planet's dayside temperature should be about 2700 K. That is hot.

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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