56 light years from Earth, the star Iota Horologii is a member of the 'Hyades stream,' a number of stars moving in a similar direction with respect to the rest of the galaxy. It's also an exoplanet host star, known to have a planet twice the mass of Jupiter in a 320-day orbit. The two factors -- the position of the star within the stream and the planet that accompanies it -- play into an unusual application of asteroseismology, the study of the sound waves that move through a star. I want to note this work particularly because it has a bearing on planet formation, about which the more we learn the better as we continue the hunt for exoplanets. But let's pause on asteroseismology itself. You may recall that using this technique for studying the interiors of stars is one of the purposes of the COROT mission, the other being the detection of planetary transits. Asteroseismology is invariably explained with musical metaphors, likening the sound moving within a star to the ringing of a...

Although the image below isn't particularly striking, do focus in on it for a moment. You're looking at what astronomers now consider the coldest brown dwarf yet to be found. Look just down from the top of the image and just left of center for the unusually red pinpoint. This is CFBDS J005910.83-011401.3, thankfully abbreviated CFBDS0059. A science fiction writer with brown dwarf credentials (Karl Schroeder is just the guy) could think of a more poetic name and set up a story around such a place. Image: Three-color image of the star field in which the brown dwarf has been discovered. The brown dwarf is the very red object seen at the top left of the image. This image illustrates how very different is the color of this object compared to the other cold stars around. Image copyright Canada-France-Brown-Dwarf-Survey 2008. As interesting stars go, CFBDS0059 isn't all that far away, some forty light years. Massing between 15-30 Jupiter masses, it's typical of brown dwarfs in at least one...

Keep your eye on a project in the Canary Islands called the New Earths Facility. Using a laser measuring device now being tuned up for the job, scientists intend to continue the hunt for terrestrial worlds with a greater than ever chance of success. Called an astro-comb, the device brings far greater precision to our existing Doppler techniques for finding exoplanets. In fact, early reports suggest it may increase the resolution of these methods by as much as one hundred times, making the detection of an Earth-like world in an orbit similar to ours feasible. Now we're getting into interesting territory indeed, not only in terms of planetary detections themselves but synergies with the ambitious Kepler mission, to be launched in 2009. Read on. Studying the Doppler shift of distant starlight has already achieved a remarkable precision, capable of finding planets down to about five Earth masses in orbits as far from the star as Mercury. But the farther we get from the star, the trickier...

Long before the first exoplanets were found, one speculation about our own Solar System was that a passing star had disrupted the solar nebula so as to promote the formation of planets. We now know that planets form in many ways, but it's interesting to see that HL Tau, a star discussed yesterday at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Belfast, may have been influenced by a recent close pass by XZ Tau, another young star nearby. Did this 'flyby' disrupt the circumstellar disk around HL Tau, helping to form a proto-planet that has now been observed? Whatever the case, we do seem to have interesting processes at work around HL Tau. The newly discovered proto-planet is thought to be only one percent of the age of a planet found last year around TW Hydrae, a world ten times the mass of Jupiter that was once the youngest planet yet detected. That one orbited inside the inner hole of a pronounced circumstellar disk. HL Tau b remains little more than a bright clump within its dusty...

Results from the Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP) could hardly be better. In the last six months, astronomers using wide-field cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa, working in conjunction with a battery of telescopes around the world, have identified ten new planets around other stars. The findings were announced yesterday at the Royal Astronomical Society's national meeting in Belfast. We're dealing with planetary transits here, planets moving across the face of their star as seen from Earth. 46 transiting worlds are known, of which SuperWASP has now found a solid fifteen. Skymaps, coordinates and background information on all the SuperWASP planets can be found here. You'll want to concentrate on WASP-6b through 15-b for the new ones, which include 'hot Jupiters' like WASP-12b (orbiting its primary, a G-class star 870 light years from Earth, in just over a day) and WASP-15b, one-half the mass of Jupiter, orbiting an F5 star a thousand light years away. The largest...