Exoplanet Hunt Update

EXO WORLDS

This artist's view shows the COROT satellite, consisting of a 30-centimetre space telescope launched on 27 December 2006. COROT will use its telescope to monitor closely the changes in a star's brightness that comes from a planet crossing in front of it. While it is looking at a star, COROT will also be able to detect 'starquakes', acoustical waves generated deep inside a star that send ripples across a star's surface, altering its brightness. The exact nature of the ripples allows astronomers to calculate the star's precise mass, age and chemical composition. Credits: CNES/D. Ducros

by Staff Writers
Boston MA (SPX) May 22, 2008
Two new exoplanets and an unknown celestial object are the latest findings of the COROT mission. These discoveries mean that the mission has now found a total of four new exoplanets. These results were presented this week at the IAU symposium 253 in Massachusetts, USA.

COROT has now been operating for 510 days, and the mission started observations of its sixth star field at the beginning of May this year. During this observation phase, which will last 5 months, the spacecraft will simultaneously observe 12 000 stars.

The two new planets are gas giants of the hot Jupiter type, which orbit very close to their parent star and tend to have extensive atmospheres because heat from the nearby star gives them energy to expand.

In addition, an oddity dubbed 'COROT-exo-3b' has raised particular interest among astronomers. It appears to be something between a brown dwarf, a sub-stellar object without nuclear fusion at its core but with some stellar characteristics, and a planet. Its radius is too small for it to be a super-planet.

If it is a star, it would be among the smallest ever detected. Follow-up observations from the ground have pinned it at 20 Jupiter massses. This makes it twice as dense as the metal Platinum.

Scientists suspect that with the detection of COROT-exo-3b, they might just have discovered between stars and planets.

COROT has also detected extremely faint signals that, if confirmed, could indicate the existence of another exoplanet, as small as 1.7 times Earth's radius.

This is an encouraging sign in the delicate and difficult search for small, rocky exoplanets that COROT has been designed for.

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EXO WORLDS

Planets By The Dozen

Huntsville AL (SPX) May 12, 2008
You know the planets of our solar system, each a unique world with its own distinctive appearance, size, and chemistry. Mars, with its bitter-cold, rusty red sands; Venus, a fiery world shrouded in thick clouds of sulfuric acid; sideways Uranus and its strange vertical rings. The variety is breathtaking.

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