Kepler starts releasing smaller planet data: 1.5 Earth Mass transit exoplanet found

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/science/space/27planet.html?hp

Re: Interesting development

The anagram was "HAT found a Neptune", if you were curious, the second Neptune class exoplanet found. The preprint describes the discovery. The star is in the constellation Eridanus, just south of Taurus in the evening sky. It transits a metal-rich star from our perspective nearly every 5 days, is slightly above the mass of our Neptune, half the size of our Jupiter, orbits the star at only 4 to 5 million miles from the star and is quite warm at about 880K.

What's interesting is HAT has been taking data on this star for over four years before the announcement. The preprint suggests the transit wasn't detected until three years of data were combined to find the shallow dip of the planet in front of the star.

A point of pride is this star is scheduled to be monitored for transits by the next generation satellite Kepler.

EDIT: The star is GSC 03561-02092 and the planet is called HAT-P-11b. (in case you were wondering).

An interesting development at exoplanet blog Oklo

"Last night, I received a mysterious e-mail from Gaspar Bakos of the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. It consisted of a single line:

A phaeton tuned fun"

http://oklo.org/?p=308

UPDATE: Just like the science discoveries of old, I believe the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope (HAT) has created an anagram. The exercise is left to the reader.

You should be reading Systemic

Systemic is a blog by Greg Laughlin at UC Santa Cruz about exoplanetary systems--the explosive new field with nearly 300 planets detected to date. The latest post is about the terrestrial analog of the island of Hawaii as Mars.

The landscape here resembles nothing so much as a habitable, terraformed Mars. Hardened ropes of lava run down to the water’s edge:

In the pre-dawn light this morning, the air was totally silent, and it was easy to imagine that I was actually on Mars, before the water was gone, when a Northern hemispheric ocean lapped up against the lava of the lowermost slopes of Elysium Mons:

New major exoplanet announcement from Corot?

The Corot satellite is a French astroseismology/transit/photometry project.
Steinn Sigurðsson over at Dynamics of Cats is pushing rumors of an announcement regarding a whole new bundle of exoplanet discoveries soon, possibly today.

For a sample of Corot data, see this 120-day graph of a star:

Image from CNES
showing various stellar oscillations as well as a periodic transit of something across the face of the star.

More rumors here too, for today.

Stellar Oscillations
Convection cells at the surface of a star create a large acoustic noise. The noise has multiple ways of traveling through the stellar interior, and can interfere constructively on the surface as the star 'rings'. It can also be used to probe the interior of the star just like earthquakes on Earth showed us the existence of the solid inner core and the liquid outer core. And it can be used to see the farside of the Sun! The ringing can have many, many modes--over a thousand. See the cute animated gif of a l=2, m=2 oscillation of a star here.


Transmission of acoustic waves through a stellar interior

More HAT-2-b news

Systemic has the weather forecast for HAT-2-b: Hot and Stormy. Don't miss the movies 1 and 2

P.S. Well I suppose you could miss them. Unique patterns.

A new exoplanet from HAT

Last December four members of the RAS were lucky enough to spend four days at the MMT/Fred L. Whipple Observatory located on Mt. Hopkins south of Tucson talking to researchers and observers. One of the systems located at the "Ridge" area of the mountain was HAT, the "Hungarian-made Automated Telescope", a collection of small scopes there at Mt. Hopkins and in Hawaii. Gaspar was too busy working to talk to us, but we now know why. The collabration has discovered a huge exoplanet orbiting HD 147506, an eight-magnitude star 441 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. It's about an eight-Jupiter mass planet in an eccentric short 5.63 day orbit around a hot F8 star, and it's as dense as a terrestrial-style planet! It was discovered because from Earth, its orbit crosses the face of the star. The next transit is tomorrow morning (from here in North America).

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001PADEU..11..107B

terrestrial exoplanet

The Bad Astronomer is reporting the ESO has discovered a terrestrially-sized exoplanet. It seems the ESO hasn't released the embargo on the info yet.

P.S. Systemic talks about it.

P.P.S. The Press Release.