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.
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?