Sometimes, when I give a talk, I’m asked why the extrasolar planets don’t have evocative names. Names and labels carry a heavy freight and they get people worked up. The agonized IAU deliberations vis-à-vis Pluto’s status as a plutoid or … Continue reading
Image Source. As the academic quarter draws to a close, it gets harder to keep up a regular posting schedule. This year, certainly, the difficulty has nothing to do with a lack of exciting developments associated with extrasolar planets. A … Continue reading
Image Source. As I write this, it’s JD 2454425.219 (17:16 UT, Nov. 20 2007). HD 80606 b whipped through periastron a little more than 10 hours ago, and the Spitzer Space telescope is literally just finishing its 31-hour observation of … Continue reading
Image Source. HAT-P-2b. The name doesn’t exactly ring of grandeur, but this planet — a product of Gáspár Bakos’ HAT Net transit survey — is poised to give the Spitzer Space Telescope its most dramatic glimpse to date of a … Continue reading
Image Source. The Transitsearch collaboration has been active since 2001, and has fallen somewhat short of success. When reporters from the likes of space dot com call, they always want to know, “How many planets have you guys discovered?” “Zero.” … Continue reading
Image Source. First, I squandered literally years of opportunity to coordinate a photometric follow-up transit search on Gl 436. Then I managed to incorrectly report the circumstances of the detection on the initial version of this (now corrected) oklo post! … Continue reading
Image Source. I’m still astounded by the dramatic detection of the transit of Gl 436b, and I’m working on some posts that sort through the scientific results and implications that this discovery is generating. GJ 436b was found using the … Continue reading
Image Source. Man, when it rains it pours! This week’s big planet news is the announcement of a second transiting planet from the HATNet project. HAT-P-2b orbits the bright nearby star HD 147506, which means that there will be all … Continue reading
Image Source. The 200-odd extrasolar planets that have been discovered with the radial velocity method are orbiting stars that lie within a few hundred light years of the Sun. The light we now see coming from GJ 876 left that … Continue reading
Image Source. As we work to get the systemic collaboration off the ground, I’ve been letting transitsearch.org coast along on basically its own devices. That will change fairly soon as we incorporate the transitsearch.org site into the oklo.org backend. This … Continue reading