I always enjoy your posts because I love planetary science and especially atrosphysics. What is interesting about the exoplanet craze is that we have some proof in the data, but often the new findings remind me of the global warming crowd. I think some science teams are too eager to prove that they found the 701st exoplanet. It’s all great, but there is a bit of over-confidence in the field over the last 10 years. Keep on posting.
Hundreds have been found, hundreds more have been suspected but not verified. The number of exoplanets known will probably double (at least) in 2012, and systems already known to contain one planet will be shown to have even more, as happened with 55 Cancri.
Global warming is strictly a political construct, has and had zero basis in any data or scientific study, and has been shown to be total BS every single time it has been studied for real, necessitating a retreat to some other unfounded political position. Recently there was a move back to “excess energy is being stored in the ocean’s depths” which is clearly A) not true (it’s been studied) and B) physically impossible, literally impossible.
IOW, there’s absolutely no connection between the global warming demagoguery and exoplanet studies.
The first (modern) claim of an exoplanet was Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf that is in closer proximity to us than most other stars. Astronomer Peter van de Kamp claimed discovery of one, and then two, planets in orbit, based on a perceived wobble in the motion of the star. It is generally thought now that his telescope had a subtle mechanical problem, as all the photographic plates taken in the same span of years (mostly since WWII) show that all the stars recorded on the plates have the same wobble.
It’s fairly likely that Barnard’s Star has at least some planets, but van de Kamp didn’t detect them.
His conclusions were tested by other astronomers, and couldn’t be reproduced using the very same data, or by re-imaging the star from different locations. That’s epitomimzes how science is supposed to work, and how scientists claim that it always does.
If it always did, the jokers pushing the AGW agenda would be out of jobs and blacklisted.
http://www.weblore.com/richard/barnard%27s_star.htma