Hopefully this will be the start of a flood..

To me, this is fantastic news. Plenty of Jovian-mass planets have been found, but almost all of them are in radically non-Solar-type orbits. I was starting to wonder if Solar-type, low-eccenticity orbits, with the Jovian planets all at reasonably large distances from their primary (to allow room for terrestrial planets to form in, and occupy stable orbits in, the habitable zone), might be rare in the Galaxy -- although that would help explain the Fermi paradox.

Once a few more of these Jupiter clones are found, we should get an idea of how common Solar-type planetary systems are.

Bill

I went though the abstracts listed. A lot of good stuff, but some of it too arcane for general public.
Just hope there will be either some press releases or at least some science reporting coming out of this.

The mention of a true Jupiter analog is great. Some of the RV surveys are reaching a time base where Jupiter types, if they are common, should start popping out of the data. At least for lower mass stars (late G's and K's and M's).

What a time we are witnessing.... back in the early 90's I would never have dreamed we would be getting a a catalog of worlds populated so quickly.... wonderful!!!!!!

Craig

Excellent news, though I think it will get barely a blurb in the public eye. We knew it would take a while, and now here it comes--in another 20 years we should be getting Saturn analogues out of the data.

<<What a time we are witnessing.... back in the early 90's I would never have dreamed we would be getting a a catalog of worlds populated so quickly.... wonderful!!!!!! >>

True enough...I still have an old issue of "Astronomy" from the early '90s with an article titled "Desperately Seeking Jupiters".

True enough, but if our SS is a guide, Saturns won't matter than much in the hunt for earthlike planets. Maybe some brighter stars could have inhabitable zones farther out, but Saturn isn't that big of a mover and shaker in the inner SS for a system like ours.

The real excitment will be in identifying all of the "Exo Jupiter"s within 20 parsecs and then IDing all of the Earths, Marses, and Venuses in those systems, and then eventually getting a spectral signal on each. Those inner planets will always have periods under 3 years or so, so once the technology is in place to do that for one of them, it will be a one-time rush to survey ALL of them. Then we can sit on our hands for the next zillion years, because that wave of discovery will be hard to follow up. Oh, there'll be a wave of expanding horizons as telescopes get better, and some VERY low-resolution mapping, but the real rush will happen at once. These Exo Jupiters just lay out the places to look.

This is great news!

There's always the chance that a slightly closer exo-Jupiter will have habitable large moons. (Look at our solar system: if Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were a little closer in and could hang onto an atmosphere, they'd be fun ocean planets to explore)

The moons might even make spectral detection a little easier, since you might get the bonus Doppler shift during the moons' orbit to distinguish the signal from the main planet and star.

-Mike

problem is that, if they were a little closer in, they wouldn't hang onto their atmosphere (hotter means the planet needs to be bigger to retain an atmosphere)

EDIT: (Look at our solar system: if Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were a little closer in and bigger and could hang onto an atmosphere, they'd be fun ocean planets to explore [if we could get underwater quick enough without being blasted by radiation].)



How big is necessary to keep an atmosphere in the habitable zone? If you mushed Europa and Ganymede together, would that be sufficient?

Would this make a differentiated metallic core big enough to generate a protective magnetic field? How would a bigger planets magnetic field interact with an orbiting moon's, would it induce or suppress it?

I'll also assume that all the calcultions done to show that a tidally-locked planet can still have a magnetic field (done for terrestrial size planets orbiting M-dwarf stars) is still valid for a large moon orbiting a Jupiter-mass planet.

A magnetic field might also cut down on atmospheric sputtering, which is yet another way to lose an atmosphere.


-Mike

Here are some of the other results presented at this conference:

A Two-Jupiter-Mass Planet Around a White Dwarf

From the listing of abstracts:











Bill

"Then we can sit on our hands for the next zillion years, because that wave of discovery will be hard to follow up. Oh, there'll be a wave of expanding horizons as telescopes get better, and some VERY low-resolution mapping, but the real rush will happen at once." JRehling

I think thou doth protest too much

I have fond rememberance of reading Poul Anderson's Trouble Twisters series from the early Polesotechnic League future history .... but I do not hold high hopes of FTL flight in my (or any ones) lifetime... I will never be able to personally physically walk strange new worlds.

Anderson's universe was bursting with life... and our universe may be the same. But really high tech civilizations probably grow up their own brain stems (or the equivalent) into virtual spaces and drop the need to burst forth physically into the outer spaces. But there are probably millions of low tech civs out there..... maybe knowing there are pale blue dots in the thousands in near galactic space will help propel us into a future worth living......

But I do not have a zillion years and I am jealous....... having a catalog of worlds... a true catalog of possibilities... that is something that I can look forward to in the years I have left.....

A zillion years is a long time..... there will be worlds enough and time....

Craig

Looks like the late Carl Sagan was on the money, once again:



This is from a conference that was written about in the August 1993 issue of Astronomy, commemorating the magazine's 20th anniversary and predicting what the field would be like on its 40th. In any event, with COROT and Kepler probably having finished their primary missions by 2013, and with GAIA, JWST, and Darwin (hopefully) just a few years further down the road, I think Sagan will be vindicated, if indeed he hasn't been already.

From the odd hints being dropped at the Santorini conference it sounds like the COROT guys are already sitting on some interesting discoveries...

Just get a move on, why don't you!!!

From the Dynamics of Cats blog about the Santorini exoplanet conference:

Extreme Solar Systems highlights

"The Swiss group has 12 new planets, several with long ( > 2000 day) orbital period and apparent low eccentricities."

"There are now 13 known Neptune mass planets, with more candidates in the pipeline (30-50 candidates just in the HARPS data set)!"

Extreme Solar Systems II

"Texas group showed a recently announced double planet system around a low metallicity star, jupiter mass and half-jupiter mass at 200 and 500d orbital period, metallicity is -0.7 (or one fifth solar) - star is HD155359, a 0.9 solar mass star that is old (! 10 Gyrs)

I don't think the "Rare Earth" hypothesis is holding up well, the pieces of the argument are being dismantled wholesale as we find more systems and gain more understanding.

There are more low mass planets around K and M stars, but people are not announcing formally stellar identities until candidates are confirmed."

Extreme Solar Systems III

"The East Asian Planet Search is also looking at giants and Sato reports more detections, the have a detection around a K giant in an open cluster and several candiates around field giants.
They also see no close in planets, their cutoff looks like 0.7 AU and they say they could see planets down to 0.4 AU (inside of that planets are being swallowed by the giant atmosphere). Puzzling.
Several of their candidate giants hosts are metal poor, to the extent metallicity can be reliably measured of course."

"The Penn State-Poland survey also reports, they have several detections and 30(!) candidate planets around a selection of field K giants; again long orbital periods.
I've seen a lot of that data, and it looks good, more planets to come."

Extreme Solar Systems IV

"There are a couple of more transiting planets in the pipeline - sounds like there is another hot Neptune in the pipeline, and I hear the TrES group found another bloated (1.7 Jovian radii?!) hot Jupiter which was first announced at another meeting a week or two ago.

The COROT people are being very coy, won't even confirm their announced sensitivity, sounds like they have looked at the first data set but not pipeline reduced it, but there is buzz that maybe they think they have something interesting; this is probably overinterpreting natural scientific caution, but honestly, why be so coy if you aren't sitting on something big!"

Extreme Solar Systems V

"dynamicists have been playing with formation models, and there is a hint that we can match the observed systems - prescription is that systems form "crowded" - just pack in as many planets as can fit, then let there be some migration, resonant locking and planet-planet scattering, and what emerges has statistical distributions that are not too far off from what is observed.
Now, we could be missing a class of systems more like the Solar System where there was little gross scattering or migration, but probably some, and we are starting to see those systems now.

Ed Thommes had an interesting talk on extensions of his old models and the "Nice" models of Morbadelli et al.
Looks like the outer solar system, with late heavy bombardment, would have come together nicely if there was another Neptune out there to begin with.
So we let debris drag bring Jupiter and Saturn into resonance with a little bit of orbital migration, scatter Uranus and Neptune out (and use the debris to recircularise) and we get the details more or less right if we let a second Neptune have been there and been ejected, either to infinity or outer Oort cloud. Hard to accommodate a planet X that big in the outer system, but maybe possible."

Extreme Solar Systems VI

"Lots of interesting stuff on planetary atmospherics.
Models are currently mainly looking at mean temperatures (at the 5-10% level) and horizontal global heat transport. Clear need to incorporate vertical transport and chemistry.

Interesting suggestion by Fortney that titanium oxide may play significant role.
Also clear that the hot Jupiters are very black in the optical, with albedos of 5% or less, which is puzzling.
Clearly they are bright in the infrared."

"Oh, and OGLE has a new microlensing planet detection - two planets in the same system!
Numbers look spectacular, formal paper and announcement should be Real Soon Now."

This blog has multiple updates every day, I suggest keeping an eye on it.

Bill