Significant exoplanet finding announcement on Monday

ESO to hold media conference to discuss significant exoplanet finding

On Monday 19 October 2009, astronomers will report at the international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, Portugal, on a significant discovery in the field of exoplanets, obtained with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope.

Interestingly enough the SpaceRef version of this has a link to the arXiv paper about the discovery of Gliese 581e... maybe yet another planet in the system?

(Putting my moderator hat on here... please don't break any embargoes, it isn't that long until the actual announcement! Patience is a virtue and all that...)

[uninformed speculation]

Being a live teleconference, I can't imagine they would announce e. Maybe such a Gliese 581 f is in the habitable zone? They sure do have a pretty suggestive picture at the SpaceRef site. Perhaps a five-planet fit to the Gliese 581 RV data can bring the eccentricity of d down to something resembling a circular orbit.

Maybe it's the GTO programme results? (please?) along with the significant discovery that 30% of solar-like stars host close-in exoplanets.

May be it is the 5 planet system annonced in the topic about CoRoT?

Sirius_Alpha wrote:Nice catch, lodp!

Dr Mayor
described a system he has seen that has five rocky planets in it. They
have masses of 11, 14, 26, 27 and 76 times that of the Earth. He
concluded his talk by saying, “I am really confident that we have an
Earth-like planet coming in the next two years.”

Though
only one of those, to me, seems rocky (let's hope that the author just
forgot to put some periods between each number's digits) this is pretty
nice. Five planet system of all sub-Jovians?? No wonder the HARPS
results are taking ages. But that's Off Topic.

Sirius_Alpha:What is the GTO programme?

It specifically says this is a discovery obtained by HARPS, so it doesn't seem particularly likely that there is CoRoT involvement. The SpaceRef graphic is one of their standard ones they use when dealing with extrasolar planets, I wouldn't read too much into it.

I doubt this is going to be about the discovery of Gliese 581 e, as we've already had the media fanfare for that one.

Stalker wrote:Sirius_Alpha:What is the GTO programme?

Garunteed Time Observation. It's a high-precision search for low-mass planets around 451 stars. Rumors were that it's found 30-40 low-mass planets (sub-Jovian).
http://solar-flux.forumandco.com/extrasolar-news-and-discoveries-f2/many-new-harps-discoveries-t13.htm

Enjoy ....


29 new planets and 3 brown dwarfs (Delfosse et al. Forveille et al.,

Hebrard et al, Lo Curto et al, Mordasini et al, Naef et al.,

Santos et al. Segransan et al, submitted)

presented by Stephane Udry and Xavier Bonfils at the Porto Conference

"Towards Other Earths: perspectives and limitations in the ELT era" 19 Oct
2009.


Data below from Udry & Bonfils.


Note: The brown dwarfs HIP103019 b, HD85390 b and HD103197 b are not
included in the Exoplanet Catalog at http://exoplanet.eu


More details soon.


Jean Schneider



Data from Udry:



Id SP [Fe/H] log(R'_HK) Vsini Prot M1 P
M characteristic Author

[km/s] [d] [Msun] [d]
[MJ]

======== ===== ====== ========== ====== ===== ====== ====
==== ============== ======

HD5388 F6V -.27 -4.98 4.24 - 1.21 777
1.96 e2, deficient Santos et al.

HD181720 G1 -.53 -5.01 1.5 - 0.92 956
0.37 e4, deficient Santos et al.

HD190984 F8V -.48 -5.01 3.4 - 0.91 4885
3.10 e4, deficient Santos et al.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HD6718 G0 -0.06 -4.97 1.76 26 0.96 2496
1.56 e2 Naef et al.

HD8535 G0V 0.02 -4.95 1.41 13 1.13 1313
0.63 e2 Naef et al.

HD28254 G5V 0.36 -5.10 2.50 37 1.06 1117
1.16 e2, e unconstr. Naef et al.

HD290327 G5IV -0.11 -4.96 1.44 36 0.90 2443
2.54 e2 Naef et al.

HD43197 K0? 0.40 -5.06 2.18 44 0.96 327.8
0.60 e2 Naef et al.

HD44219 G5 0.03 -5.03 2.22 31 1.00 472
0.58 e2, curved drift Naef et al.

HD148156 G1V 0.29 -4.94 5.7 14 1.22 1010
0.91 e2, curved drift Naef et al.

HD156411 F8 -0.12 -5.05 3.3 22 1.25 842
0.74 e2 Naef et al.

HIP103019 K5 -0.30 - - - 0.70 917.6
52.6 e2, Brown Dwarf Naef et al.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HIP5158 b K5 0.10 -4.80 1.57 42 0.78 344
1.3 e2, curved drift Lo Curto et al.

HD125612 b G3V 0.23 -4.83 3.11 21 1.09
4.1547 0.067 e2, 3-pl system? Lo Curto et al.

HD125612 b previuosly known: Fischer et al 2007
ApJ 669 1336-

c 551.8
3.1

d 4613
7,1

HD215497 b K3V 0.23 -5.01 1.67 50 0.87 3.93
0.017 e2, 2pl-system Lo Curto et al.

c 567
0.33

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BD-082823 b K3V -0.07 -4.8 1.4 37 0.74 5.60
0.045 e2(+Hipp), 2pl Hebrard et al.

c 237.6
0.33

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HD85390 K1V -0.07 -4.91 1.12 40.1 0.76 781
45.3 e1 Mordasini et al.

HD90156 G5V -0.24 -4.90 0.33 24.0 0.84 49.8
17.5 e1 Mordasini et al.

HD103197 b K1Vp 0.21 -5.05 1.68 47.8 0.90 7.76
5.06 e2 Mordasini et al.

c 47.8
35.8

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HD9578 G1V 0.11 -4.66 1.64 12.3 1.12 494
0.62 e2, noisy, bis? Segransan et al.

HD63765 G9V -0.16 -4.75 1.63 26.0 0.86 356
0.69 e1, act, coralie Segransan et al.

HD104067 K2V -0.06 -4.78 1.61 36.9 0.79 55.8
0.16 e1, curved drift Segransan et al.

HD125595 K4V 0.02 -4.82 1.5 40.8 0.76 9.67
0.045 e2, act Segransan et al.

HIP70849 K7V - - 1.93 - 0.63 >3000
<blockquote type="cite">5 e2, P poorly cons. Segransan et al.

</blockquote>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Data from Bonfils (papers by Forveille et al. and Delfosse et al.,
submitted):


GJ 433 b M = 0.019 M_Jup P = 7 days

GJ 667C b 0.018 7

HIP 12961 b 0.47 57

GJ 676A b 4 1000

Wow nice! Planet spam is right!
That places us above 400 known exoplanets (402 for now), and places 2009 as the most productive year yet.

Edit: Unless I failed to get the time-zone conversion right, the news conference has already occurred, just before exoplanet's post. Maybe exoplanet's post is the significant announcement for today. I hope I'm wrong, I haven't looked at all 29 planets yet, but nothing there looks like it would immediately jump out as astounding and newsworthy.

Edit2: Good to see some nearby (20 - 30 LY) red dwarfs getting some planets.

Edit3: The new three-planet fit for HD 125612 looks unstable, with planet periods of 502 d, 551 d, and 4613 d.

On 19 October 2009, at an international exoplanet conference, the team
who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better
known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope, reports
on the incredible discovery of more than 30 new exoplanets, cementing
HARPS’s position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter.
Check ESO:
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-39-09.html

...

So this is it? This is the results of the HARPS GTO programme?

Yes, this is it.
I live in Porto, Portugal.
I am about 300m from CAUP but working and cannot attend the conference ....

I received the text in the "exoplanet" mailing list from EPE.

Cheers

I don't see how it could be though. Several (most) of the new planet hosts aren't in the GTO programme, and we were told that ~30 sub-Jovians had been found.

And sorry to hear, exoplanet v_v

Edit and clarification: My confusion isn't related to being bored by these new 29 planets, I'm quite amazed with them. I'm just having a hard time seeing how this is from the GTO programme.

Edit (can never have enough edits):

HD 85390 turned out to be 0.14 M_Jupiters. That's 30 planets today.