wassup?

so, er, anyone hear of any new exciting results?

y'know: loads o'planets, measurements of dark energy EOS, burpy black holes?
and wtf will Kepler announce on thursday, eh?

- or, y'know, be considerate and stop publishing exciting new stuff when the rest of us are trying to get term started!

oh, and the NRC rankings of grad programs come out in 5 weeks...

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The Beeb had a story yesterday about a Sun-like star with at least five and possibly as many as seven planets. One of the "possibles" is estimated to have a mass 1.4 times that of Earth.

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 25 Aug 2010 #permalink

That'll be HD10180. From exoplanets list:

>From Christophe Lovis et al (Astron. & Astrophys. accepted):

- 6 planets around HD 10180
- among them 5 Neptune-like planets (from 12 to 25 Earth mass),
more than in the Solar System
- a sub-Saturn (64 Earth mass)
- no giant planet closer than ~5 AU
- a possible 7th planet with 1.4 Earth mass (TBC)

see
http://exoplanet.eu/star.php?st=HD+10180

Jean Schneider

There are some rumours around that Kepler will announce an Earthlike planet August 26. Why now?

I see the radial velocity folks are at it again claiming their 1.4 Earth-masses super-Earth is the smallest known exoplanet... pulsar planets get no respect.

Pulsar planet detection depends on timing, i.e. the light travel time caused by the reflex orbit, rather than the velocity of the reflex orbit as in the radial velocity method. In the case of PSR B1257+12 (which remains the only known planetary system that remotely resembles our own inner solar system), the effects of the gravitational interactions between the two super-Earth planets has been detected, yielding the system inclination and thus the true masses, with a degeneracy between whether the orbits appear to be clockwise or anticlockwise in the sky plane. Assuming the innermost planet is located in the same plane as the two super-Earths, it has a mass roughly 1.6 times the mass of our moon, and is currently the lowest mass planet known, including the ones in our own solar system.

From this blog I've heard rumours that there is a third known pulsar planet system, and that the parameters of the planet orbiting the PSR B1620-26 binary have been significantly refined, but nothing in the literature so far as I'm aware...