[meteorite-list] A bunch more planets. Yawn.

[Sterling K. Webb]

Hi, Darren, List,

    As Carl said, if there's nothing (or nobody) out
there, it'd be an awful waste of space, a principle
alluded to one of the conferencees: "If there is space
to put a planet there, there will be a planet there."

    Everyone should bear in mind that the mix of
detection methods is heavily biased toward massive
planets close to their stars. those oddballs. In all
probability, there are cold distant Jupiters by the
hundreds for every close hot Jupiter and equally
great numbers of Earth-to-Mars-sized Earths for
every Super-Earth hugging an M dwarf, too.

    Maybe a thousand for every one. Planets are
just a natural outcome of the way the universe is
put together.

    Like life...


Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse at charter.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 11:52 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] A bunch more planets. Yawn.


We now live in a time when there are so many known extrasolar planets 
that the
discovery of a few dozen more of them is kind of pedestrian.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gSIOd5240uPvZThYwptYclUq5E3QD9BE6H4O0

Lots more planets found outside solar system

By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP) - 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar 
system,
adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where 
life could
develop.

Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find 
any
planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even 
unusual.
But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered 
outside the
solar system to more than 400.

Six of the newly found planets are several times bigger than Earth, 
increasing
the population of so-called SuperEarths by more than 30 percent. Most 
planets
discovered so far are far bigger, Jupiter-sized or even larger.

Two of the newly discovered planets were as small as five times the size 
of
Earth and one was up to five times larger than Jupiter.

Astronomer Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva said the results 
support
the theory that planet-formation is common, especially with certain type 
of
common stars.

"I'm pretty confident that there are Earth-like planets everywhere," 
Udry said
in a Web-based news conference from a conference in Portugal. "Nature 
doesn't
like a vacuum. If there is space to put a planet there, there will be a 
planet
there."

What astronomers said is especially exciting is the high percentage - 
about half
- of a type of star systems with relatively light stars that had planets 
around
them. This is more than planet-formation theory expected, astronomers 
said. Two
of the four planets found around these type stars were relatively close 
to Earth
size, said astronomer Xavier Bonfils of Grenoble Observatory in France.

The discoveries were made by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet 
Searcher,
which looks for slight wobbles in a star's movements, which would be 
made by the
tug of a planet's gravity on the star. There are no photos of these 
planets.
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