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Posted on 10/15/2009 5:30:45 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Stand by for yet another "significant discovery" in the field of exoplanets.
That's the word that will come out next week from an international gathering of exoplanet experts during a conference in Porto, Portugal.
The new finding makes use of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher.
Called HARPS for short, this device is a spectrograph for use with ESO's 3.6-meter telescope.
B The noteworthy revelation is to be announced on Monday, October 19.
Detailing the finding will be Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, Xavier Bonfils of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Grenoble in France, as well as Nuno Santos of the University of Porto, Portugal.
Next week's conference of exoplanet researchers is headlined as Towards Other Earths.
Experts at the meeting are discussing new generation instruments and telescopes now being conceived and built by different teams around the world to allow the discovery of other Earths, such as use of the European Extremely Large Telescope.
Just letting you know that “Astronomy” is a far better topic for this thread than “Miscellaneous.”
Before anyone starts squealing about sciences wild claims about having found “earthlike” planets, The planet quest directory lists 374 planets found and 0 “earths”.
Blame the media for the hyperbole.
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
First Class M exoplanet?
PING
I think if they find a larger-than-Jupiter exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star, it would be more interesting because it will likely have several very large moons that could be Earthlike.
ping
European Extremely Large Telescope.
Note this is not something going on in the US any longer. If anything look for the headline from the new WH news broadcasts touting the American Extremely Small Telescope.
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