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

Good first step.

[Restil]

We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.

Also of interest are planets in habitable zones, even large ones. Moons around larger planets could work as well as earth does in the right orbit. Of course, being in such close proximity to a massive planet could present other problems, as massive bodies are more likely to attract other significantly sized rocks, as well as a LOT of radiation if there is a significant magnetic field.

-Restil

Re:Good first step.

[Captn Pepe]

We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.

I assume that, by "smaller changes", you are referring to the detection of extrasolar planets by spectroscopic searching for the periodic velocity signature of an orbiting body. Unfortunately, this method will probably never be sensitive enough to detect an earthlike planet at earthlike distances; the smallest planets detected so far are roughly Jupiter-mass.

On the other hand, direct optical observation of earthlike planets is possible using large interferometers. Note that this is probably only possible with free-flying space-based telescopes, but it might just be doable using terrestrial interferometric telescopes with advanced adaptive optics. What's more, interferometers can not only detect such planets, but should be able to resolve spectra for them, telling us immediately whether or not they are likely to be habitable or hosting life of their own. For instance, since starlight breaks down ozone, an ozone signature in a planet's spectrum would be an almost certain indicator of biological or exotic chemical processes at work producing large quantities of oxygen. And so on.

David Spergel's new telescope lens

[juju2112]

I read an article in the last issue of Discover magazine about a breakthrough telescope design that could let NASA see much smaller planets.

The best part about it is that it's a cheap solution -- you just add this weird "cat's-eye" type lens onto a normal telescope. This deflects all the light from the center of the frame away, but allows the light on the side of from to come in. This way, the light of the much brighter nearby star won't block out the smaller planet.

The Discovery article was pretty cool. This is the only equivalent I could find online.. Unfortunately it doesn't go into as much detail.

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0416/6a.shtml