COROT Discoveres Its First Exoplanet

woohoo. though over 230 extrasolar planets have been discovered since 1995, this is still impressive: ESA's (and CNES - the french space agency) COROT mission, the first mission whose primary objective is the detection of extra-solar planets, announced its first exoplanet discovered today! the planet was discovered using the transit method (developed by dear professor sasselov at the cfa), has a radius of around 1.78 times that of jupiter, and orbits a sun-like star located around 1500 lightyears away from us with an orbital period of around 1.5 days (for comparison, jupiter's orbital period is 4333 days). most impressively, given the success of this first discovery, the researchers on the project believe that COROT will be able to detect earth-sized planets using the transit method, which was not the original plan. (image credit: esa)