Teleidoscope

Wed, May 16, 2007

Extrasolar Planets

Posted at 8:07 pm MDT to Current Events

People have been announcing the discoveries of more and more extrasolar planets. And it seems like each one is stranger than the last: hot Neptunes, hot Jupiters, something only a bit bigger than Earth orbitting a red dwarf with a year only 11 terrestrial days long, planets ridiculously close to stars that are metal-poor. There's at least one star where 2 planets are currently known. This is fun.

There is a list of 215 (as of May 2, 2007) extrasolar planets maintained by the Geneva detection project.

It's kind of amazing to think that as recently as 1990, the number of Confirmed extrasolar planets was Zero (the first extrasolar was reported in 1989, but it took a while to confirm it). There have been 26 planets added to the list just since April 1 this year, and that probably doesn't include the ones I've seen announced this week.

There are reports about all sorts of weird things being learned about the planets and moons in our outer Solar System, too. (For the record: I think that if Pluto is a planet, so is Ceres)

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