Firstly, CoRoT is a CNES (French) mission, where ESA is only a partner. It is also a small mission, so their PR resources are limited. Secondly, as others have already said, tt is not enough to see something transiting a star. RV confirmation (which is hard due to lack of available resources) is needed to ensure the object detected is indeed a planet.

Its incredible accuracy is fascinating. If they really can get as clear singal as is physically possible, the outcome of the mission may be much better than designed and expectde.

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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 so! but at the same time i think that if they had found it and sended the papers to peers i thing there should be already some rumours around ... i would be very happy with a planet about 3 terrestrial masses i guess we have to wait more two days one thing is for sure i think that COROT might on is timeframe be the first to detect a terrestrial like planet and that would be essencial results to the development of darwin and tpf missions..

Kepler is go ! I saw this story a few months back, it looked Kepler faced some bad cuts but everything looks ok now and its scheduled for launch in early 2009

http://www.space.com/spacenews/07071...ay_kepler.html

There's always a chance Corot might get the jump on Kepler for Earth like worlds but Kepler is probably the better telescope for detecting Earth-like planets, Kepler will benefit from the latest NASA technology and is also a bigger scope with a 1.4 meter primary mirror

Is the press conference for tomorrow still on track?

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"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

The press conference is suposed to be on 20 December on Paris lets hope he dosent get postponed again!

I try not to get too excited, as it seems the CoRoT team is releasing only some preliminary results. Certainly they know more than they will reveal, and the spacecraft will no doubt make several major discoveries as the mission progresses.

CoRoT is a very small mission, and uses a method whose effectiveness is directly related to the area and time covered (i.e. more scopes the better). With the price tag of one Kepler mission one can get several such missions. While true Earth analogs are beyond reach, a vast amount of data could be retrieved nonetheless. Including Earth-like planets around red dwarfs.

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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

Okay good news!

Apparently this press conferecne will happen today at 11.00am CET. Two hours later the data will be on the ESA website. Cant wait!

http://www.spaceurope.blogspot.com/

Another typical transiting hot Jupiter

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/COROT/SEMF0C2MDAF_0.html





A lot of stellar seismology data coming back, oscillations were found in 2 stars that are very like our sun

Congratulations to the CoRoT team for surpassing my most pessimistic expectations...

I would have expected them to be bolder than that, they certainly have many more promising candidates. But I can't blame them for not having not enough telescope time to do RV confirmations. The stars are distant and dim, and therefore hard to study.

The wait continues...

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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 little dissapointing - another hot jupiter :-)

ESA should have put money into building more ground based facilities to support their missions. NASA launches Kepler in 2009, it may be late getting to the exoplanet race but I imagine you will find NASA will have a lot less trouble following up its readings with confirmations from ground based observatories.

Some interesting info about the regions observed at the end of the article

Corot will be watching a new area in the direction of the 'Unicorn', it will be observing this region for 'at least 150 days'

The most important thing about this press conference wasnt the anouncement of CoRoT-exo-2b according to Rui Borges at Spaceeurope there are " around 40 light curves containing signs of possible planets" on this short time this is a fantastic value, thats like almost all planets that were foud by photometry since the begining if confirmed on ground,(actualy till now by transit method there are only 35 planets found counting already with these two that corot found!) and corot will probably get much more light curves of possible planets till the end of is mission!! other thing stated was "Among these possible exoplanets there are two candidates particularly promising...a planet two times smaller than Saturn and another one of jovian size but with a unusual density..." to me these are fantastic news for the field! About exoearths i think that after this press conference and with the sample analysed till now the inexistence of low masses on the samples might indicate that corot might not be up to the task of detecting teluric planets (of course that a planet two times smaller than Saturn is small one but even so is far from an earth size telluric one).

Don't take those 40 as granted, there are several ways stars (and brown dwarfs) can mimic a planetary transit and it is possible that most of them turn out to be false detections (remember the 100 Hubble "planets" which turned out to be 2 confirmed and 14 potential detections)...

There are even more rumours of CoRoT planets, so there indeed are many planet candidates being confirmed. I would have expected the team to reveal more of them today... But if they don't have enough RV measurements of the planets their carefulness is understandable.

One should also remember that the data is only now being analyzed. Both the announced planets are clearly visible in the light curve, but finding transits over dimmer stars and by smaller planets is much more difficult. Let alone to confirm.

If CoRoT's photometry is as accurate as claimed, it should be able to detect Earth-sized planets around relatively near red and orange dwarfs. That means potentially habitable planets. Planets with couple to few Earth radii (giant terrestrials, ocean planets) should be easily detectable.

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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 disappointed. Only one planet and some general self-praising blablach. Well, what you expect from ESA? ESA is known for its not-so-friendly policy about relasing results to general public.

It will be interesting comparing time of relase from Kepler and reading apogoletic stunts from ESA adherents.

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Sanity is overrated.
Butterfly.

Well I am surprised at how the results have been talked up with hyped intensity. We were led to believe some great discoveries had taken place and "medals" had been awarded. Sorry but this smells of European mediocrity rearing its very nasty little head.

Either we are being totally misled by propaganda, or CNES is just being very tight lipped. I would like to think its the latter.

WE were also told that COROT would spot earth sized planets. WE were also told - in one of the few press releases since in 2007 - that COROTs instruments were even more accurate than previously thought.

Another strange thing is look how small the COROT section at ESA is. It should be billed as one of their most interesting missions at the moment but if you look on the homepage its really hard to locate the webpage.

If this was the NASA Kepler mission there would be weekly updates and a blog, hundreds of pages detailing the science and equipment etc....The difference is NASA appears to understand they have to show results to the public to keep their generous funding. We wouldnt be counting on obscure European space blogs for a "rumour" from the supposedly highly "excited Mr Fridlund". This is publicly funded reasearch and the information and findings should be shared with the public and the scientific community. It should not be treated like some big secret.

When i complained about this lack of transparency before someone gave me a link to the erroneous Hubble announcement about 100 planets being found. Ya, that was a mistake but i prefer an honest and overtly eager PR mistake than being miseld purposefully in regards to a publicly funded project.

Remember that the CoRoT team hadn't told anything publicly before the news release. Everything was just rumours, and if we got hyped, it's our fault. Though I hoped that they would have revealed more planets as it seems they have more of them confirmed.

The nominal accuracy wouldn't have been enough to spot Earth-sized planets. They're just started to analyse the data and signals of smaller planets certainly are not easy to detect. CoRoT-Exo-1b and CoRoT-Exo-2b both are very large planets that orbit relatively bright stars smaller than the Sun, so they were very easy to detect.

I'm confident they will make one or several major discoveries, but it'll take time.

CoRoT is an CNET (French) mission where ESA is only a partner. And it is actually really small mission with a tiny spacecraft.

Kepler is far larger mission conducted by an agency that has long experience on PR. It was also very close of being cancelled. ESA had similar project, Eddington, that wasn't as lucky. Stupid, if you ask me because this kind of missions should be relatively easy to do and they produce vast amounts of important data (not just about planets).

This is good example why major discoveries must not be released too hastily.

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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

Detail - neither NASA nor ESA has been in the business of building ground-based telescopes (with one-off exceptions like the NASA 3m IR telescope at Mauna Kea and the ESA optical station on Tenerife). Now ESO has put a while lot of money into ground-based facilities, some of which have suitable high-precision radial-velocity instruments for followup. In fact, it's commonly thought that European astionomers would be better placed for ground-based followup than their US counterparts unless those counterparts all work in California, Hawaii, Arizona, or Texas...

Two kinds of data can act to confirm - the usual reflex Doppler cycles, and, since we already know these objects are transiting, the Rossiter-Mclaughlin effect. This is the change in a star's mean Doppler shift produced as a dimmer companion blocks various parts of is rotating surface, and in some transiting hot Jupiters, has has a wavelength amplitude considerably larger than the reflex motion. Plus one need only observe during the transit window. The amplitude tells you something about relative sizes of star and planet (dpeening on how well the star's rotational velocity is known from high-dispersion spectra, no picnic for solar-type stars), although getting th emass independently takes full orbital coverage.

Kullat Nunu,

The fact is the pre-hype was misleading. And I appreciate ESA was a smallish partner but it did give funding for the French project. But it matters little because its not as if the French public got some kind of advance data. My point is about the relative stinginess from European publicly funded space projects.

"THE MISSION:
Astronomers from ESA's Member States are taking part in a French led mission, the first to search for rocky planets around other stars. The mission, COROT, is an important stepping stone in the European effort to find habitable, Earth-like planets around other stars."

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/are...cfm?fareaid=39

Now we are told that it cant find rocky planets. This is just one example of misleading information regarding COROT, and the recent leaks provided by Mr Fridlund to Space blogs have been very exaggerated accounts.