Because we only have direct images of a tiny number of planets orbiting other stars, we're used to extrapolating as much as we can from our data and plugging in possible scenarios. But as the recent announcement of two 'super-Earths' around Kepler 62 demonstrates, we're coming up hard against the limits of our knowledge. The comments on my recent story on the Kepler find bring up Greg Laughlin's always interesting systemic site and a post he made in early April. Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) is worth reading not only for his shrewd analysis but for the sheer brio he brings to the exoplanet hunt. And here he sounds a note of caution: I think we currently have substantially less understanding of the extrasolar planets than is generally assumed. Thousands of planets are known, but there is no strong evidence that any of them bear a particular resemblance to the planets within our own solar system. There's always a tendency, perfectly encapsulated by the discipline of astrobiology, with its...

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Thus Cassius speaking to Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, trying to convince him that what happens to us comes not from some malign fate but from our own actions. I'm sure he's right, too, but I admit there are days when I wonder. For the stars seem aligned in such a way that whenever there is a significant news conference about exoplanets, I have a schedule conflict. This is true yet again today, so that I'm writing before the NASA-hosted news briefing and will have to set this up to post automatically after the embargo expires. Here, though, are the main points. We have found Kepler 62f, an interesting world about 1.4 times the size of Earth and most likely rocky. When you add up the other known facts about the planet, the attention builds. Discovered through Kepler data in the constellation Lyra, this world receives about half the heat and radiation that the Earth does, while orbiting...

We've looked at a couple of exoplanet issues this week that bear further comment. The first is that different detection methods can be usefully combined to cover different scenarios. If radial velocity works best with larger planets closer to their star, direct imaging takes us deep into the outer planetary system. We saw yesterday how both imaging and radial velocity could be used to probe subgiant stars. We routinely use RV as a check on transiting planet candidates. And gravitational microlensing can find planets at a wide range of separation from their primary. I think microlensing has plenty to teach us, though I'm sensitive to the criticism voiced in comments here that we're dealing with non-repeating events when we have a microlensing detection. Centauri Dreams reader coolstar has also noted that distance may be a factor, questioning whether some of the resources by way of telescope hardware that we're putting into microlensing studies wouldn't be better employed looking at...

Our exoplanet detection methods have their limits. Radial velocity studies work great in the inner regions of planetary systems, but become more challenging as we move away from the star. Direct imaging is the reverse -- we’re most likely to see a distant planet if it’s both large and well separated from the primary. Clearly we need to take the best data from each available method to characterize a planetary system. But direct images are rare and some stars -- A-class in particular -- are tricky for RV studies because of jitter and other problems. If you want to get in close to an intermediate mass star to look for planets or a debris disk, the way to do it seems to be to study ‘retired’ stars sitting on the subgiant branch of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. These are stars that have slowed or stopped fusing hydrogen in their cores. Core contraction raises the star’s temperature enough to fuse hydrogen in a shell surrounding the core and the star begins to swell up toward giant...

The news that NASA has approved the TESS mission kept my mood elevated all weekend. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has been the logical NASA follow-up to Kepler ever since the Space Interferometry Mission was canceled in 2010. The point is that Kepler looks at a field of stars with the goal of developing a statistical analysis, helping us (ultimately) to home in on the value for ?Earth (Eta_Earth), the fraction of stars orbited by planets like the Earth. To do this, Kepler is looking out along the Orion Arm of the galaxy, with almost all the stars in its field of view between 600 and 3000 light years away. In fact, fewer than one percent of Kepler’s 156,000 stars are closer than 600 light years. There are plenty of stars beyond 3000 light years, but as we push beyond this distance, the stars become too faint for Kepler’s transit methods to be effective. The carefully chosen field in Cygnus and Lyra is ideal for Kepler’s statistical data but the next question to ask is...

While transit and radial velocity methods get most of the press when it comes to finding exoplanets, gravitational microlensing offers an independent alternative. Here a star passes in front of a far more distant object, causing the light from the source to be gravitationally ‘bent’ by the intervening star. The useful thing for exoplanet work is that if the ‘lensing’ star is orbited by one or more planets, they can leave their own signature in the microlensing event. And indeed, microlensing collaborations like MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) and OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) have made the method pay off in exoplanet discoveries. Image: Gravitational microlensing relies on chance line-ups between an intervening star with planetary system and a more distant light source. Credit: California Institute of Technology. Now researchers at the University of Auckland are proposing to measure low-mass planets, planets as small as the Earth, using these...