Image source: designonline.se

Today’s astro-ph mailing contains a paper by McCollough et al. detailing the discovery of a new transiting planet orbiting a sun-like star lying in Corona Borealis. Dubbed “XO-1” — easily the coolest name yet for an exoplanet– this world has a year that lasts 3.941534 days, and a mass roughly 90% that of Jupiter. The temperature at the scalding, toxic, vortex-riddled cloudtops should be a torrid 1083 K. It ain’t no habitable world, folks, but as the fifth extrasolar planet found to transit a relatively bright (V=11) parent star, it’s big news nonetheless. Bright parent stars are great for planetary characterization, because they make detailed follow-up a lot easier to carry out.

The preliminary indications are that this planet, which has a measured radius of 1.3 plus or minus 0.1 Jovian radii, is somewhat larger than expected. Our theoretical models predict that XO-1 should have a radius of 1.05 Rjup if there’s a 20-Earth mass core, and 1.11 Rjup if the planet is core-free. If the large radius is confirmed, then we’ll be faced with the same radius problem that we’re facing with HD 209458 b (as explained in this oklo post from Dec. 2005). An interesting clue may be provided by the fact that the XO-1 parent star, like HD 209458 is not particularly metal rich.

The paper lists four amateur observers as co-authors. Three of them, Tonny Vanmunster, Ron Bissinger, and Bruce Gary, are long-time transitsearch.org participants. P.J. Howell is the fourth amateur co-author on the list. As usual, the photometry that these guys are getting is excellent:

Figure adapted from the McCollough et al. paper.

The paper describes in detail how the photometry from the amateur observers was able to effectively leverage and speed up the discovery, and how the ready-made network provided by the small-telescope observers eliminated the need for an expensive robotic follow-up observatory.

Sounds to me like it’s time to crack open a bottle of Hennessey XO. Congratulations all around, guys!