Great wobbling doppler shifts and shades of distant worlds, this is getting familiar. New planets are starting to seem about as newsy as the listings of homes that sold or police blotter summaries. Interesting, but rather routine. We’ve got hundreds of them so far.

To be sure the latest haul includes some weird ones. And by the way later this week, press advisories say, a second team is to announce yet another odd extrasolar world.

First up: On Monday the European Southern Observatory announced that one of its telescopes in Chile, equipped with an instrument called the HARPS spectrograph (for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher), has added 50 new planets to the list. This includes 16 ‘super Earths,’ or worlds of a mass not too much greater than our own planet has and conceivably made largely of silicate rocks and just possibly an atmosphere like ours, maybe even water. Which is a lot of maybes. One in particular has an orbit around its feeble star that makes liquid water plausible, if not probable.That makes it a candidate for the Goldilocks Prize – a planet with just the right mass, right temperature, right atmosphere, right orbit, and right everything else to support life as we know it. Word of the planet haul came at a meeting in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. It will get formal publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Interesting if not significant on the scientific collegiality front is that the meeting co-chair is famed planet hunter Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley, while the big newsmaker is the HARPS team where a prominent leader is Michel Mayor of Switzerland, his longtime rival in the doppler-method of finding planets.

Some reporters led with the size of the trove, 50 planets. Others first went straight for Super-Earth and Goldilocks. Pretty much all of them got around to both bites of information.

Stories:

• BBC – Paul Rincon: Fifty new exoplanets discovered ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Hot new planet could be in habitable zone – barely ; One of the few (maybe only) stories that looks closely at the meaning of “potentially habitable.”
• MSNBC/Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Fifty new alien worlds revealed ; And ‘pick of the litter,’ writes Boyle, is HD 85512b, just 36 light years away and the one that plausibly is in the habitable zone.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: ‘Super-Earth,’ 1 of 50 Newfound Alien Planets, Could Potentially Support Life ; Her story includes a fanciful gallery of extrasolar planets – all of them with colorful artist’s impressions of what they might look like but almost surely do not, plus a sidebar noting that this makes about 600 new planets that surveys have found so far.
• Guardian (UK) Hannah Godfrey: Super-earth exoplanet found that could support life ; This story at least carries a photo of a real planet. Ours. It looks, as it happens, a lot like one artist’s impression of the Goldilocks candidate 36 light years away. I cut and pasted them to prove it.  Earth, with Madagascar visible on close inspection, is on the right.
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Batch of 50 New Alien Worlds Discovered ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Newly discovered planets include super-Earth ;
• New York Times – Dennis Overbye: 36 Light-Years From Here, New Hope for an Earth-Like Planet ; Dennis pointedly mentions both the new glamour puss in planet finding, the Kepler Telescope with its transit-seeking spectrometer, and the older Dopply-technique surveys including that of the HARPS team. This is among the stronger, more writerly reports on this news. It includes two conflicting opinions about the supposedly Earth-like super planet. One thing, however. Overbye writes that the Kepler telescope can’t help examine the HARPS team’s new super-Earth because it is staring at a different place in the sky. He didn’t have room for everything but the explanation might well also have mentioned that even if this were in Kepler’s field of view, it’s not lined up for transits visible from here. So the story’s passage is like saying some guy can’t see his house because he’s facing the wrong way…  but not mentioning that, anyway, he’s blind.
• Agence France Presse via Montreal Gazette: Astronomers claim biggest haul of other worlds ; Good for AFP. It relies on the press release – and says so.
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Scientists Discover Potentially Habitable Alien Planet ;
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: New ‘super-Earth’ that is 36 light-years away might hold water, astronomers say ;
• Mail (UK) Scientists find fifty new planets … and one of them could have alien life ; Dont’cha just love that – not only life out there but to make this clear, alien life.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: 50 New Planets Discovered ; A shorty, but good for her. Dayton calls up a few other astronomers for opinion, even though they are not quite in the planet-finding game. Minor correction: She puts Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in San Francisco, which is about 30 miles north of the institute’s actual home in Mountain View and just outside San Jose, a larger burg than San Fran. From Australia it all looks the same. She calls Paul Davies too. He is Australian but works at Arizona State. He’s also mostly a cosmologist. No matter. Calling almost anybody who at least follows the literature closely almost always adds a dimension lacking when calls, if any at all, go only to people on the paper’s author list or in the press release.

Grist for the Mill: ESO Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

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