http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0610098

It has a complete list of the planetary candidates and their measured properties.

The total number of announced candidates is nearly half the estimated 35. Since only two planets were confirmed with RV measurements, they used very stringent acceptance criteria (for example, maximum radius R = 1.4 Rj). I wonder how many potential planets were among the rejected candidates.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/34/text/

Mauro

Thanks for the link. I see that the blurb on the press conference summary refers to “candidate” planets, rather than planets, so my guess is that they will not have detailed RV follow-up on all of the candidates.

G

There will be a news conference on this discovery.
So your guess is correct!

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/sep/HQ_M06152_HST_Planetscgrv.html

That’s interesting information, and would seem to explain the discrepancy between the 167,000 stars listed in the more recent proposal abstract and the 300,000 stars listed on Sahu’s home page. They probably decided to go back and work harder on the confirmation end before announcing any planets. They must have used a lot of large-telescope follow-up time.

When the candidate stars are at magnitude v=21+, it’s got to be extremely difficult and time-consuming to get ironclad follow-up confirmation on a large number of planets. (It’s even hard for surveys that have candidates in the V=11-14 range, where the stars are 10,000 times brighter). I know, for example, that the TrES survey had to carefully cull many candidates prior to finding TrES-1 and TrES-2. It’s a similar story for WASP and OGLE as well.

If they’ve got 300,000 total stars, then there should be about 60+/- sqrt(60) transiting planets in their data set if bulge stars formed under the same conditions that pertained to disk star formation. I would be very suspicious of a 100+ planet figure, which would indicate that somehow the bulge stars are _more_ effective at forming planets en masse. Given that the bulge stars may be the product of highly irradiated star-forming environments, I just don’t see how they can have a higher-than-solar-neighborhood planet forming efficiency. A 100+ number almost certainly indicates that a fair number of false positives remain unidentified.

In any case, it’s interesting to speculate, but it’ll be even more interesting to see what actually gets announced. I’m going to be reading that Nature paper the moment it comes out!

BBC (July 2, 2004): Hubble discovers 100 new planets

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3856401.stm

If this is confirmed, in seven days we will have doubled the number of planets known in nine years — Steven Beckwith, Space Telescope Science Institute

Nothing was heard of the discoveries before the press conference announcement.