Probably should have been here, but needs a crosslink anyway:

Space Exploration topic methane detected in exoplanet's atmosphere

(More direct: NASA news release: Hubble Detects Organic Molecule on an Extrasolar Planet)

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I'm curious, how would such a planet appear?Would it be glowing orange hot even at the nightside with winds of speeds in magnitude of 10 000 km/s?
That's truly a hell planet.Venus is a nice good cool habitable inviting planet compared to this.
One thing that I don't understand is that how that planet can even exist?It is only about 1.776 x as massive as Jupiter so I would expect that the planet's gas envelope would evaporate early in it's life, leaving a*lava ball superterrestrial.Was there any sign of atmospheric evaporation detected.

Ten new SuperWASP planets (follow this thread).

No much information about the planets is available yet. From the news release:
That planet has the shortest-period of confirmed extrasolar planets. However, some of the SWEEPS planet candidates have much shorter orbital periods.

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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

Let's do some wild extrapolation:

Now a total of 16 new planets have been discovered in 2008 so far. However, only 1/4th of the year has passed. That means if the current rate continues, at the end of the year we should have a total of 64 planets, surpassing the record year 2007.

On the other hand, in the period of 2002-06 the average number of new planets/year was only 30. If the transit method is finally delivering its promise, 60+ planets in this year is what we can realistically expect.

PS. The COROT team is following 100 planet candidates, and discovery papers are being prepared so one can expect news from them sooner or later...

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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

HL Tau b, a planet less than 2000 years old!?

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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

Information on the planets is now on-line.

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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'll guess 90, based heavily on wishful thinking.

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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) :)

One can always hope, but there is a serious limit on the availability of telescope time. Even if the transit method was much more productive than it has turned out to be, the number of new discoveries couldn't be dramatically higher because each discovery must be confirmed by measuring the radial velocities. Large majority of promising candidates turn out to be false positives, unfortunately.

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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 was afraid that might be the case. Do you have an idea when we might see a noticeable rate increase?

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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) :)

What counts as a noticeable increase? We were just given the by far biggest batch of transiting planets so far. Last year we saw a big jump in transiting planet discoveries, and it is not impossible that in this year most planets will be found using the transit method.

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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 was thinking about new scopes or new mass surveys coming on-line to assist the search. I don't recall anything coming up in the next several months, but there are some nice spacecraft planned.

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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) :)

Kullat Nunu,

I love this thread, thanks. How did you come by the "100 planet candidates" figure? Is this more than just a guess on your part?

It is fun to speculate on how many new planets will be discovered/announced in a given year. Each year new planets are discovered and the discoveries that astronomers are sure enough about from previous years are announced. Clearly there will be a time when the number of extrasolar planet discoveries really accelerates and the number of candidates piles near a thousand. That time, as the new SuperWASP results and probable COROT results imply, may not be too far off.

That figure comes from the spacEurope blog. No idea how secure cases those are. If they're just "planetary like transits", the value will no doubt radically fall.

So it was thought. Back in 2005, it was believed that when the planetary transit searches are in full swing (like now...) there should be around 186 detections/month. None of the searches turned out as successful than expected, and interestingly the only ones that have found anything are among the ones using the smallest telescopes.

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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 kept in mind ( waiting anxious... ) end of februari as being the time when the new Corot discoveries were anounced to be published by Esa.
We surpassed with one month now.
Has anybody an idea if Esa released a new date for the next releases ?

The COROT team has release three papers, describing two planets:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.3202
http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.3207
http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.3209

Enjoy.

There are reports on the discovery of Gliese 436 c, "the smallest planet found so far". Unfortunately and unlike the various news articles suggest, the discovery is still far from certain. It would be great if the planet is confirmed: the previously found planet, Gliese 436 b is a transiting planet which means that any other planets orbit probably very close to edge-on (as a matter of fact, Gliese 436 b is a hot Neptune and only transiting planet of its kind). The inferred minimum mass of ~5 times Earth's would therefore be close to the true value. In addition, if we are exceptionally lucky, we could see transits of the secondary planet!

Even though the existence of the planet is unclear, the eccentric orbit of Gliese 436 b strongly suggests that it is not the only planet in the system. Only time and more radial velocity measurements will tell if the suggested planet really exists.

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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

Is this planet smaller than Gliese 581c? It's reported mass was just over 5 as I recall.

What conditions can be on it?If it has a Venuslike albedo and atmosphere, then it must be melting hot according to this http://www.astro.indiana.edu/~gsimon...perature1.html.

Alonso et al. report that they are unable to confirm the existence of Gliese 436 c.

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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

Well, ok, but I would wanna know what possible conditions atmosphere etc...may be there thx in advance for answer

timb - yes, gliese 581 b was a bit heavier

ESA COROT: Exoplanet hunt update

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That makes 22 so far this year, I think, 6 shy of 300.

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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) :)

The planet has been retracted from the Transiting Planet conference at Boston. Looks pretty certain it wasn't real.

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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

Two more exo-transit discoveries:

* XO-4b
* XO-5b

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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

Greg Laughlin reveals that the secondary transit¹ of the hyper-eccentric planet HD 80606b has been observed by Spitzer. He has also made a major discovery, but the only hint given is an anagram.

In other news, ScienceNews reports that the ultra-precise HARPS instrument has not been idle: of the 400 stars it has observed, 45 showed signs of low-mass planetary companions. The results are still inconclusive, but if confirmed, this would mean that about 30% of Sun-like stars have hot super-Earths or Neptunes. The discovery of a system consisting of three super-Earths is to be published in mid-June.

¹) Secondary transit occurs when the planet is blocked by its star. It is best detectable in infrared, since stars tend to be kind of bright compared to planets in the visible light.

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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

This sounds like a superior conjunction. Are you saying IR photometry is better for transit studies, which make sense, and why Spitzer is involved, I suppose?

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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) :)

The contrast between a hot planet and its star is relatively low in infrared compared to visible light. Take a measurement just before or after the transit, and a measurement during the transit, subtract it from the former and voilà! you've got the IR spectrum of the planet.

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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

systemic blog has more information on this. Looks like there are several multiple planet systems and, unfortunately, that high eccentricities are common. On the bright side (pun intended) none of the stars studied is a red dwarf but more or less Sun-like FGK stars. The high number of detections makes it likely that a transiting super-Earth is discovered soon.

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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

Where is the 30% figure coming from? Isn't 45/400 * 100= 11%?

Is this a technique used to discover planets, or observe them after discovery?

The article says the 45 are a subset of the total found. These 45 are less than about 10 times Earth's mass, whereas the 30% figue is based on a range up to about 30 times.

__________________
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) :)