Yesterday, John Johnson and the California-Carnegie Planet Search Team posted an astro-ph preprint announcing the discovery of three new extrasolar planets. All three radial velocity data sets have been added to the Systemic Console, and the transit predictions have been placed on the transitsearch.org candidates list.

HD 86081 b has an orbital period of 2.1375 days, which makes it a long-sought “missing link” between the weird, ultra-short period planets discovered by the OGLE survey and familiar hot Jupiters such as HD 209458 b and 51 Peg. HD 86081 b has been checked photometrically for transits, but unfortunately, they don’t occur. Because HD 86081 b orbits so close to its parent star, the a-priori transit probability was a healthy 17%.

HD 224693 b and HD 33283 b have longer periods of 26.73d and 18.179d, respectively. The parent stars are excellent targets for the transitsearch.org project, as neither one has been monitored photometrically during the centers of the transit windows. The a-priori transit probability for HD 33283 b is an impressive 6.2%, whereas HD 224693 tosses in a 3.2% chance. That’s a 9.4% chance that a small-telescope observer will be a world-famous astronomical hero sometime during the next year…

Dust off those CCD cameras!