42 Worlds in 32 Days

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

Comments

Multiply 42 by several thousand

[Alsee]

They were detecting these planets by watching for "transits", in other words eclipses. If you look at a star&planet from a random direction there is a VERY small chance that it will happen to line up exactly right to see an eclipse. I would estimate the chances as several thousand to one.

With further analysis they can get a pretty solid multiplier for the number of unseen planets. These other planets must exist, and you now know something about them. In a sense they have indirectly measured many thousands of planets.

Even without seeing them, the indirect knowledge about the other planets has scientific weight. This indirect measurement will be very useful in our understanding of other solar systems, how they are structured, and how they form.

The scientific value of the 42 measurements carries a large multiplier.

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