The Exoplanets Rising conference, now in progress at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (UC Santa Barbara), is offering a treasure trove of online material, including one I'm currently watching, a presentation by Magali Deleuil (Astronomy Observatory of Marseilles Provence) on CoRoT results. It's extraordinary for those of us who couldn't be at the conference to have quick access to talks by the likes of Michel Mayor, Lisa Kaltenegger, Geoff Marcy and Debra Fischer on everything from transit puzzles to metallicity trends. Interesting to note that CoRoT is now, according to Deleuil, at the end of the 'nominal lifetime of the instrument,' although CoRoT's extended mission has been approved and the spacecraft will remain in operation until March of 2013. Deleuil says that thirteen observing runs have been completed, totaling 75,000 light curves from 'stares' of more than 60 days and 50,000 light curves from 25-day stares. Since February of 2007, 150 planetary candidates have...

Making discoveries with new space missions always seems frustratingly slow, probably because with missions like Kepler, our expectations are so high. So it's interesting to ponder what all is involved in getting the data analyzed and the discoveries pegged. This post from the Kepler team's Charlie Sobeck points out that the first five planets Kepler found were the result of six weeks of flight data and about 25 days of ground-based observing to eliminate the false positives and determine the mass of the planets and properties of the host stars. Nothing runs as smoothly as we might wish. The Kepler team had to sort through much of the data manually because the data processing software is not yet fully functional at NASA Ames. But word from the site is that a major software upgrade has finished development and can now be applied to analysis of almost a full year of data. It's also worth noting that the Kepler mission is now being managed by Ames rather than the Jet Propulsion...

Claire Moutou, one of an international team of astronomers behind the discovery of the planet CoRoT-9b, says the distant world will become a 'Rosetta stone in exoplanet research.' And perhaps it will, for this is a transiting gas giant, but not a 'hot Jupiter.' In an orbit not dissimilar to that of Mercury, CoRoT-9b transits its star every 95 days, each transit lasting about eight hours. We've identified approximately 70 planets by transit methods, but this one is ten times farther from its host star than most gas giants previously discovered by this technique. We may be jumping the gun a bit to call the climate here 'temperate,' as this European Southern Observatory news release does, because temperatures here will depend on layers of highly reflective clouds that may or may not exist on CoRoT-9b. ESO cites temperatures between 160 degrees and minus twenty degrees Celsius beneath those assumed clouds, but we should be able to learn much more because of the lengthy transit periods....

Want to play around with some numbers? The process is irresistible, and we do it all the time when plugging values into the Drake equation, trying to find ways to estimate how many other civilizations might be out there. But a question that is a bit less complicated is how many terrestrial planets exist in the habitable zones of their stars? It's a question recently addressed by Jianpo Guo (National Astronomical Observatories, Kunming, China) and colleagues via simulations. By 'terrestrial' world, the researchers refer to planets between one and ten Earth masses, although they note that some scientists would take this figure lower, to perhaps 0.3 Earth masses, which may be enough to retain an atmosphere over long geological timescales and to sustain tectonic activity. Guo's team is interested in the distribution of terrestrial planets in our galaxy, and the simulations that grew out of this study create a probability distribution of such planets in habitable zones. The paper is laced...

We've been talking for the last six years (since Centauri Dreams' inception) about finding a terrestrial world in the habitable zone of another star. It's an exciting prospect, but the reality about space missions like Terrestrial Planet Finder and Darwin, each designed to make such identifications, is that the budget ax has fallen and we don't know when they might fly. Indeed, we still face a host of technological difficulties that call for much work if the aim is not only to find a terrestrial world but also to study its atmosphere for possible biomarkers. Alternatives are therefore welcome, and one is to look for terrestrial worlds around nearby red dwarf stars using transit methods. Usefully, an Earth-size planet orbiting such an M dwarf would be easier to spot than the same size planet orbiting a star like the Sun, and we could use 'eclipse spectroscopy' with the James Webb Space Telescope to study such a planet's atmosphere. Right now we're making Doppler surveys of nearby M...