Big Extrasolar Planet Announcement
Keith’s note: The Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is making some sort of big extrasolar planet announcement Thursday. That’s all we know (we have received nothing under embargo).
Keith’s update: This announcement will be made on Monday at the AAS meeting.
A “big” announcement, hmm. Did they find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone around a sun-like star in the data, maybe? Or nail down the mass for a couple of planets whose radii we know?
Maybe they can see some atmosphere
I think they’ve done that with some exo-gas giants already. It’d be cool if they did it some more, but they probably wouldn’t make a big announcement on it.
Ok good, so it must be bigger, hmm
presumably they scheduled their announcement to not conflict with Musk’s reveal of the new Dragon xD
Folks:
SETI?
tinker
SETI? Highly unlikely.
Oh that would be huge….. but I doubt it! 🙁
Where are these leakers when you want them?
Here’s the planned presentations that day from their team, just to give an idea of possible announcements…
Rates of Large Flares in Old Solar-like Stars in Kepler Clusters
Ofer Cohen (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Kepler 56: Present & Future Configuration & Obliquity
Gongjie Li (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Three Distinct Exoplanet Regimes Inferred from Host Star Metallicities
Lars A. Buchhave (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
HARPS-N Contributions to the Mass-Radius Diagram for Rocky Planets
Dimitar Sasselov (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Background:
K-56: super-Earth system w/ unusual obliquity to star’s spin, implying unusual formation history (Science, 10/18/13, 331); theory of super-Earths is still a moving target
Host stars’ metallicities correlate with size of planets: high metal = large planets; small planets = range of metals; maybe implying that high-metal planetary disks mean planets form more or less readily.
Mass + radius = density, which implies relative rockiness/gassiness of the planet; so far they have densities on only a fraction of the planets.
This is everything I know. You’re welcome.
A planet in the Goldilocks Zone, with a confirmed Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere and liquid water on the surface would be nice – but I don’t think we have the means yet to detect that.
They have mass data, which translates to densities as they have the sizes. One object, approx. two Earth radii, has density that suggests mainly metal.
http://www.washingtonpost.c…
Indeed, a “big” announcement. Rocky planet 17 times the mass of earth : )
The announcement is posted, and surprising – the discovery of a 17 Earth Mass rocky world – a “Mega Earth” – http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/…
Surface gravity on that world? Anyone have a guess? How would it affect the evolution of life on the surface?
Using the published numbers for planet radius and mass, the surface gravity would be on the order of 32m/s^2 or about 3.2-3.3g.
Given it’s a tight-orbit ‘hot Earth’ orbiting a G-type star with an orbital radius probably half of Mercury’s, the probability of Earth-type hydrocarbon life is very low. There are plenty of exotic options, I suppose, like liquid metallic biology but I’ll leave that to the xenologists.