Alien planet poised to reveal all its secretsLuhman argues that any future definition of the term that includes extrasolar planets should stipulate that the objects form from a disc of gas and dust around their host star – and not from a collapsing gas cloud.
by David Shiga
8 September 2006
This find would be excluded from planetary status if such a definition were adopted, a situation that Luhman says is interesting in itself. "It's a neat idea that you have a planetary-mass companion that may not really be a planet," he says.
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~ftod/tres/tres.html
TrES, the Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey, is a network of three small-aperture telescopes (pictured above) searching the sky for transiting planets. The network consists of Sleuth (Palomar Observatory, Southern California),
the PSST (Lowell Observatory, Northern Arizona) and
STARE (Observatorio del Teide, Canary Islands, Spain).
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the TrES telescopes takes timed exposures of the same field-of-view all night for as many nights as the field is favorably positioned (usually around 2 months). When an observing campaign is completed for a particular field, the multitude of data are run through software which, after correcting for many sources of distortion and noise, produces light curves for thousands of stars in the field. Other software is run to analyze the processed data for variable stars and transit candidates. It takes two or more transits (or cycles in a variable star) to discern the period of the orbit (or the variability).
More on TrES-2:
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~ftod/tres/tres2.html