ESA Finds New Jupiter-Sized Planet
There cannot be more worlds than one.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
“We don’t know if CoRoT-Exo-4b and its star have always been rotating in sync since their formation about 1 billion years ago, or if the star became synchronized later,” said University of Exeter researcher Suzanne Aigrain.
The European Space Station’s CoRoT space telescope has recently discovered a new exoplanet– CoRoT-Exo-4b–orbiting around the distant sun-like star COROT–Exo-4, a Jupiter-sized planet which takes 9.2 days to orbit its star, the longest yet of any transiting star. The telescope was specially designed to search for these extrasolar planets by looking for tiny dips in the light, outputting from a star when a planet passed directly in front of it.
This has been a surprising find as the planet is thought to be “too low in mass, too distant from its star to have a strong enough gravitational pull to influence its rotation”. (Space.com) Considered the first transiting exoplanet found to have such unique combinations of rotation periods and mass, scientists are actually hoping to discover how stars interact with their planets by measuring their host stars’ rotation periods. These recent findings were presented at the CoRoT-Exo-4b findings at the Cool Stars 15 meeting at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Last May of 2007, it was announced that COROT had discovered its first exoplanet, with the first bit of “Seismic Information” ever found on a Sun-like star far away, with accuracy of raw data. COROT is a CNES project, with ESA participation, a mission with a dual goal—the first space mission that is dedicated to the search of exoplanets. Yet the search for them has slowly begun to pick up in the world of astronomers, now finding more than 300 exoplanets—recognized by the wobble they develop while orbiting their host stars. Multiple planets cause complicated motions, with reflect the realities of telescope scheduling through the SYSTEMIC program, including a limited amount of data on the stars, making any type of identification most difficult.
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