Latest COROT Stories

[WATCH VIDEO: Ultra-High Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online It won't happen again until 2117, but one team ensured everyone at the 44th meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada that they got plenty of data as Venus transited the Sun earlier this year. Jay Pasachoff of the Williams College and Caltech, Glenn Schneider of University of Arizona, Thomas Widemann of Paris...

  A nearby star is pummeling a companion planet with a barrage of X-rays 100,000 times more intense than the Earth receives from the sun. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope suggest that high-energy radiation is evaporating about 5 million tons of matter from the planet every second. This result gives insight into the difficult survival path for some planets. The planet, known as CoRoT-2b, has a mass about three...

The French-led CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) satellite has found ten new planets outside our Solar System. The new find brings the total number of known exoplanets to 561.  CoRoT launched in 2006 and it spots planets by measuring the tiny dip in stellar light that occurs when planets pass between the stars and the Earth. The spacecraft has added 23 planetary systems to the roster so far. CoRoT went into orbit shortly after NASA's Kepler, which is a similar mission...

Star known as HD49933 is located 100 light years away from EarthIn a bid to unlock long-standing mysteries of the sun, including the impacts on Earth of its 11-year cycle, an international team of scientists has successfully probed a distant star.By monitoring the star's sound waves, the team has observed a magnetic cycle analogous to the sun's solar cycle.Results of the study, conducted by scientists at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and...

In a bid to unlock longstanding mysteries of the Sun, including the impacts on Earth of its 11-year cycle, an international team of scientists has successfully probed a distant star. By monitoring the star's sound waves, the team has observed a magnetic cycle analogous to the Sun's solar cycle.The study, conducted by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and colleagues in France and Spain, is being published this week as a "Brevia" in Science.The...

By detecting the faint dimming in the light emitted by stars during a transit event, CoRoT has detected six new exoplanets - each with its own peculiar characteristics - and one brown dwarf. One of these exoplanets, designated CoRoT-11b, has twice the mass of Jupiter and orbits a rapidly rotating star; this type of star is an extremely difficult target for exoplanet searches and its detection marks a significant achievement for the CoRoT team. In order to detect planets orbiting other suns,...

Combining observations from the CoRoT satellite and the ESO HARPS instrument, astronomers have discovered the first "normal" exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. Designated Corot-9b, the planet regularly passes in front of a star similar to the Sun located 1500 light-years away from Earth towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake)."This is a normal, temperate exoplanet just like dozens we already know, but this is the first whose properties we can study in depth," says Claire...

GREENBELT, Md., Jan. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The most earthlike planet yet found around another star may be the rocky remains of a Saturn-sized gas giant, according to research presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The first planets detected outside our solar system 15 years ago turned out to be enormous gas-giants in very tight orbits around their stars. We call them 'hot Jupiters,'...

When scientists confirmed in October that they had detected the first rocky planet outside our solar system, it advanced the longtime quest to find an Earth-like planet hospitable to life.Rocky planets "“ Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars "“ make up half the planets in our solar system. Rocky planets are considered better environments to support life than planets that are mainly gaseous, like the other half of the planets in our system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.The rocky planet...

This week, Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special issue devoted to the early results obtained with the CoRoT space mission. It includes 55 articles dealing with the primary goals of the CoRoT mission, that is, exoplanet hunting and asteroseismology, and also with other topics in stellar physics. Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special issue this week dedicated to the early results of the CoRoT space mission [1]. The CoRoT (Convection, Rotation & planetary...