thursday's news has far to go

I'm sure this will be a wonderful and smashing discovery, but the continuous cycle of hinting in the exoplanet business is turning me off. They should just announce when they're ready, rather than playing games. If the discoveries aren't solid enough to announce, don't hint, or announce and take the risk of getting embarrassed. Although nobody seems to really suffer for writing a wrong paper, anyway.

These guys were very careful to not hint.
The reason the news is circulating in the nether regions of the intertubes is first of all because certain observing schedules are public (and I agonised over whether to note at the time that some observations were being done, but I refrained), and secondly because the supporting publicity material is already accessible and has been read by a bunch of people.

Good thing cosmology never plays this game of foreshadowing upcoming results, eh?
;-)

Well that was enough of a hint to figure it out. Exciting.

The wikipedia page for the star has what appears to be the precursor image. There's no hint of anything there, to my eye, anyway.

I believe I've figured out what the star in question is, and filling in the blanks from there, I'm willing to believe it could be quite interesting...

if it ain't an earth-like planet broadcasting pay-per-view then why make us wait?

You'll never find me defending cosmology-by-press-release, but I can't think of too many recent results that had a hype buildup other than CMB measurements (BOOMERANG, WMAP). Maybe this is because cosmology isn't where the action is anymore? Or because in exoplanets, there's the theoretical (if not actual) chance that someone could scoop you by observing the same object, or pre-announcing their similar results on a different object.

I just hate reading stuff like: Dr. X showed a table of N super-earths at a conference but whipped the slide through too quickly for anyone to read the details.

I'm not smart enough to narrow this one down from the observing schedules.

I enjoy the hints. And I love the juicy details found on this blog like "Dr. X showed a table of N super-earths at a conference but whipped the slide through too quickly for anyone to read the details."

I'm just sorry that the hunt for extrasolar planets can't be more physical anthropology, as in "We found these anomalous bones. We don't understand what we're looking at, but here they are, have a look. Oh, we're evocatively calling them 'hobbits' and we're telling the world's press that we found a new homind species, but we know you'll be skeptical so lets have a good career-building argument in the anthro journals for the next decade or two!" That kind of early disclosure is fun for everyone.

In this case, at the very least, I wish last week the NASA announcement had said "We not only used the ACS, but we used it on star (fill in star name here) and we found the following neat planet stuff (fill in neat stuff here) and we'll have a press conference on Thursday -- see you then!" And better yet, I wish right from the start the astronomers in question had said "wow, we think found (fill in neat stuff) but it will take a year or two of number crunching to really rule it in or out, but what an interesting possibility, huh? We'll keep you up to date on our progress!"

And Steinn, why wouldn't you blog about the observations when they were being done? The Hubble Telescope was paid for by the taxpayers (even the ones from Iceland without representation!) And beyond the narrow issue of what is tax-payer funded: The hunt for extrasolar planets is a grand adventure, and I can't imagine why researchers in-the-know wouldn't want to share as much of it as possible with the rest of us, much as the mars missions have been doing.

I didn't blog the observations when they were done, even though they were public information, as a matter of professional courtesy.
Not my result to announce, especially in the verification phase, which, as this game goes, often means finding a negative result.
Also, although I could infer a lot from the observing log, down the PI being one of two people, and the system being one of a small number, I couldn't know for sure exactly which system it was or what the result might be - though you can infer a lot knowing the capabilities of the observatory and the pattern of observations.
But there is too much buzz preceding the press announcement for me not to comment at this point.

As for cosmology buzz - I was thinking more broadly than microwave background, lots of hype on teaser observations of dark matter and dark energy related stuff.
It is fair game, there are necessarily leaks of such things, and building up some expectation is rational if sometimes counterproductive.

Steinn, I just want to acknowledge that I did read your thoughts on the related subject of secrecy-to-avoid-being-scooped here:
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2008/08/scooped.php
I was on vacation when you originally posted it, so I didn't respond at the time, but I was grateful for the post, and I thought it was very interesting reading.

In that post, you did note the exclusive arrangement Hubble users are granted. While researchers should work out a way to protect their bragging rights, I obviously think that the public should get a better deal: more transparency, more access to work-in-progress.

I just read an interesting Hubble Daily Report on sci.astro.hubble from the second week in September that can be found by including "extrasolar" as a search term. ....I don't understand why the researchers wouldn't want that Daily Report pointed out to people like me - people who don't monitor the reports but might be interested.

I had a unexpected opportunity to chat with my congressman a few years ago, and of all the things I could have talked to him about, I decided to mention the problems that SIM Planetquest was having in getting funding. (He made a great show of acting interested.)

It seems to me that professional astronomers should want the general public to be interested enough to advocate for new research funding. I'm surprised that it isn't a professional courtesy to alert the public when something interesting and ostensibly-public-but-obscure is going on in astronomy. I hope this doesn't sound disagreeable - I have nothing but love for this blog.

@Eric.

I've written congressmen and the senators in the state I live in specifically about SIM PlanetQuest funding. I'm glad you talked to that congressman about the issue as well. I wish more people would do this. We have a voice, let's use it.

Thomas, absolutely. But the researchers in question have voices too -- I wish they would use theirs more often to communicate with the rest of us.

James Nicoll addressed this issue in his distinctly wry way:

"I still have the impression the Venus Express people are sequestering information away from people who might react to it with squeals of glee and bales of money." (See http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1489675.html)

I think the same applies to COROT, to the study in question by Hubble, and probably to other extrasolar planet hunting teams as well.

Ouch. Keck images a three-planet system. The discovery will be published in today's Science Express. A result from a competing group?

http://www.keckobservatory.org/printer_friendly_with.php?id=228

There is a difference between access to raw data (like the proprietary period for some Hubble observations) and access to work in progress. Data does not just come off the telescope with a big arrow and label "PLANET HERE =>". I could give you every bit of data I've ever taken (a lot of it is already public, and I've waived the proprietary period on some of it) and you might see a few pretty (and a lot of ugly) pictures, but you wouldn't be able to tell what was interesting in it. It's my job to find that and convey it to other astronomers and the public.

That is why astronomers spend months analyzing data. During that process, we go down blind alleys, make missteps, introduce bugs in our code, and sometimes eliminate them. Asking to see all of people's work in progress is a bit like asking to taste a raw chicken. Not only is it a bad idea, but it might put you off the finished product.

Few people will actually sit on or refuse to reveal a truly finished result. What I was complaining about earlier is when results are unfinished but the chefs wave them under your nose anyway - "Here, smell but don't taste!" This is having it both ways - they get a frisson of claiming priority, but if the project blows up in their faces (like burning the stew), it never makes it into the journal and they suffer no embarrassment. I don't mind bragging, but bragging and keeping results half-secret is annoying. Results that are actually embargoed until publication don't bother me.

I agree with Ben here... it is very annoying when people do a press release but don't actually release the data for months later... remember the announcement back in April that SuperWASP had discovered about a dozen planets? Only a few of those have had papers published, coordinates revealed, etc. (and in the meantime HATNet independently discovered one of the SuperWASP planets, so we now have the elegant and poetic designation WASP-11b/HAT-P-10b)

Similarly the systems HD 181433 and HD 47186 which were announced in the same press release as the triple super-Earth system HD 40307.

I guessed the wrong star.

Oh wait. I did guess correctly. There were two announcements. That or there is some shoddy science journalism out there.