First Four Exoplanets of 2012 Discovered

astroengine writes "Only four days into the New Year and the first four exoplanets of 2012 have been spotted orbiting four distant stars. All four alien worlds are known as 'hot Jupiters' — large gas giant planets orbiting very close to their stars. Their orbits are aligned just right with the Earth so that when they pass in front of their parent stars, they slightly dim the starlight from view. The discovery was made by the The Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) Project (maintained by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) consisting of six small (11cm diameter), wide-field automated telescopes based at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO), Cambridge, Mass. and The Submillimeter Array atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii."

Comments

Hmmm ...

[gstoddart]

Not to nitpick (and because I'm curious), have these just been announced, or have they actually been discovered in 2012? It's not entirely clear from TFA.

Man, this stuff used to be practically sci-fi, now it seems to happen all the time.

Re:OT: What's the "Solar Meridian"?

[Doc Ruby]

Any equator, meridian or other line is infinitely thin.

I don't know about any mysterious field there. But Mayans were indeed excellent astronomers and calendarmakers. The ecliptic plane does intersect the galactic equator, and the Mayans reportedly marked those lines and that point, fairly prominently in their astronomy. Many ancient cultures, including all over the Eastern Hemisphere, marked days as special when the Sun rose or set at some point aligned with some other sky object, often marked with a calendarical artifact. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Maya noted the day that the Sun rose at that point along the horizon, even if that day were in the distant past (and/or future; these are cycles, as the Mayans knew).

So is that day 12/21/2012? Or is this latest hooey 100% hooey?

limites types for discovery

[zerosomething]

To this layman the current system seems to rely on faster moving large planets. Most if not all recent discoveries are plants that orbit on the order of days. It's not likely we will find larger planets like those in our system with this method. Saturn takes something like 22 years to orbit the sun. You won't see many transits of longer orbit exoplanets in the typical astronomers career.