Posted on 07/19/2007 8:57:21 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Fleenor is part of a venture known as the XO Project. Funded by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., the XO Project is a joint effort between professional and amateur astronomers in the United States and Europe to discover planets orbiting other stars. And it is through this collaboration that Fleenor, using his backyard observatory, was part of the discovery of two such extrasolar planets, XO-2b and XO-3b. The type of planets that the project hunts for are called transiting Jovian extrasolar planets... "Transiting" indicates that the planet's orbital plane carries it in front of the star from our point of view, making the star appear to dim slightly... usually by no more than 2 percent... Further, the periods of these worlds are on order of days, meaning they have an orbit just as tight as or tighter than Mercury's around our sun.
(Excerpt) Read more at knoxnews.com ...
The Great Orion Nebula photographed by Mike Fleenor from his driveway in West Knox County in 2003. [Mike Fleenor] Amateur astronomer Mike Fleenor pauses in his backyard observatory in West Knox County. With his computer-enhanced 14-inch telescope, Fleenor recently helped confirm the existence of two extrasolar planets. [Paul Efird]
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Amateur planet hunters help find strange super-Jupiter
Cosmos Online | Friday, June 1, 2007 | Janette Ellis
Posted on 06/02/2007 11:34:27 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1843919/posts
If I’m not mistaken, I believe the preferred platform for the XO project is Unix, so it won’t get sidetracked by the XOXO project...
There’s a joke in there, but I dunno what it is... :’)
The truth is out there.
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