COROT launched successfully on a Soyuz
COROT is a small transit survey telescope, launched by CNES (France) to look for low mass planets. Secondary science is astroseismology and stellar structure from high precision photometry time series.
Good luck.
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Corot is a very nifty little satellite.
It is a french space agency small satellite, designed to measure convection, rotation and to find planets.
It started off as an astroseismology mission, in the Proteus class of standardised mini-satellite buses (hey! now there's a concept, standardized…
CoRoT, the French stellar photometry satellite, had a press announcement at 1 pm (Paris time) today
They announced the discovery of CoRoT Exo-2b their second extrasolar planet.
3.5 Jupiter masses, 1.4 Jupiter radii with an orbital period of 1.743 days around a K0V star, 12th magnitude.
UPDATE: ESA…
Dave Charbonneau: why transits are cool
Kicking off afternoon session is Josh Winn on transit uses and abuses.
Then Gaspar Bakos on ground based transits.
you get masses, and planetary radii.
Can go to low masses and close in planets, and working to earth masses in habitable zone - Real Soon Now…
Coming soon.
For the unintiated, CoRoT is a French small space telescope, optimised for high precision relative photometry of bright stars observed in the optical.
Originally conceived as an astroseismology mission, to study the oscillations and variability of solar like stars in the neighbourhood…
"Low mass" meaning less than the Saturn- or Neptune-sized smallest yet observed extrasolar planets. Not counting the smallest of the 3 around that pulsar, which are probably the cores of former Jovians stripped cleran by supernova, as first suggested in print (in fiction, beforehand!) by Science Fiction author Poul Anderson, who had wanted to be an astrophysicist. He told me that seeing his name in print, in a footnote of an astrophysics journal, was a high point of his life.
Anyway, we are awaiting discovery of Earth-sized planets around other stars. That will be a very big deal indeed, in some sense completing the Copernican revolution.
The planets around PSR1257+12 (of which there are now 4), are almost certainly not ablated cores of pre-existing planets - the pulsar kinematics and current orbits of the planets essentially preclude that possibility.
The planets almost certainly formed post-supernova from a gas poor debris disk, either a "fall-back" disk from the supernova, or a debris disk from disrupted low mass stellar companion or high mass planet.
The two lower mass PSR1257+12 planets are sub-terran in mass.
I have a long-held question about the population distribution of exoplanets that somone who comments here might be able to answer. As briefly as possible, how much of what we know about the size/orbit distribution is a result of observation bias? I feel like I mainly hear about close-in superjovians, but those are also clearly the easiest to detect. With current technology, are there enough planets that we don't see, but would if they were there, to draw meaningful conclusions?
Should Kepler help with this?