28 new planets announced at the AAS summer meeting
it is the Berkeley/Carnegie/Australian group - interesting bunch, including mostly Jovian planets with orbital radii greater than 1 AU.
Several are around G-subgiants, which are mostly descendants of A and F stars, somewhat more massive than the Sun (mass estimates can be hard for those stars) , four multiple planet systems and three planetary systems containing a brown dwarf as well as planet.
Hm, the most interesting new one seems to be missing from the list... I guess we'll get a separate announcement on that one.
Good haul, not done yet.
More like this
(Based on actual events.)
Younger offspring (age 4.5): (singing softly to self while arranging a line of nine grapes on breakfast plate) Nine planets, fine planets, in our solar system. Nine planets, fine planets, go ahead and list 'em ... *
Kepler has discovered 11 new "solar systems" with 26 confirmed planets among them. They:
It seems the IAU ruling on what counts as a planet has stirred a little controversy in the Free-Ride home.
Dr. Free-Ride: (to younger offspring) Could you teach me all the words to your song about the planets.
Younger offspring: It's secret.
Actually, it appears that none of the 28 new planets are actually "new" in the sense they haven't been announced earlier...
Hm, some like GJ849 have certainly appeared before, but the new total of 236 is higher than last month's total of ~ 220, so without doing an ADS track of every HD number I had figured about half were genuinely new announcements and the rest were the total sample for John John's thesis or something.
They were listed on the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia (http://exoplanet.eu). Since the announcement some of the planets have migrated from the unconfirmed planets section increasing the number of confirmed planets to 241 (including pulsar planets).
It is great to see that much more distant planets are being found now as we have longer and longer observation timespans. It is however worrying that not even them seem to orbit in decent circular orbits.
Dear Steinn,
When planets are discovered, how often are the stellar abundances of the major "metals" (e.g. C, N, O, Mg, Si, Fe) also reported? Or have most of these been previously determined and catalogued somewhere?
cheers,
LL
The stars currently targeted for planet searches are generally very bright and catalogued, with listed metallicities.
During the radial velocity searches some metal information is usually picked up (not as much as you'd think, since the spectral range is narrow even if the resolutions is high).
However the big groups have I think all put in a program to characterise their target stars, since there is a finite error rate in the historical catlogs.
Where are these catalogues, of which you speak?