Russia Will Begin Hunt For Extrasolar Planets

Apparently they're going to do so using the transit method. Also, the article mentions Soviet telescopes... What?

“Scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory are planning to use ground-based instruments to study the transit of planets around their parent stars,” Zelyony said at a roundtable meeting at RIA Novosti headquarters in Moscow.

Russia Will Begin Hunt For Extrasolar Planets (Universe Today)

Identifying atmospheres around exoplanets

How Well Can Astronomers Study Exoplanet Atmospheres? (Universe Today) 

At this point, how well can astronomers study the atmosphere around an exoplanet? 

Currently, there are only a handful of methods researchers can use to make estimates of exoplanet atmospheres. Interestingly enough, one method makes use of the light coming from the host star. The basic principle is that the light from a star can be analyzed both before and after an exoplanet crosses in front of the star. By comparing the spectrum from the host star, and the spectrum of an exoplanet, the tell-tale signs of atmospheric contents can be detected.

Kepler discovers 26 planets in 11 systems, speeds up discovery of exoplanets

Credit: NASA Ames/Dan Fabrycky, UC Santa Cruz

Kepler is at it again with 26 confirmed planets. As expected, when you have a telescope with 2300+ candidate discoveries there's going to be a lot of confirmations... From NASA's Kepler website:

"Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits." 

2012 will be a fun year to watch and I'm positive the 1000 number will be breached. Because Kepler is still a relatively young mission, it will take considerable time before planets with wide orbits (and longer periods between transits) will be detected--but I expect a lot of future detections there as well.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, its host star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form. 

The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen of them are between Earth and Neptune in size, and further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun.

NASA's Kepler Announces 11 Planetary Systems Hosting 26 Planets

Scientific American: if planets can form somewhere, they will

Credit: Scientific American/NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Scientific American summarizes our changing views of the universe thanks to the past two decades of extrasolar planet discovery.

Planets in habitable zones, planets orbiting twin suns, miniature solar systems, rogue planets, planets, planets, planets. If there is one single piece of information you should take away from the recent flood of incredible exoplanetary discoveries it is this: Our universe makes planets with extraordinary efficiency – if planets can form somewhere, they will.

We’ve been sidling up on this fact for some time now, but it’s still a remarkable thing to acknowledge. Ten to fifteen years ago, as the first exoplanet detections began to come in, we understood that what we were seeing was potentially just the tip of the iceberg. These were massive objects (Jupiter sized or greater) and most of them were orbiting much closer to their parent stars than any equivalent giant planet in our solar system – hence the ‘hot Jupiter‘ moniker that is still used today. Statistics improved, as did our understanding of how detection techniques were biased towards finding these types of planets (owing to their greater gravitational influence on their parent stars), and estimates were made that suggested only a few percent of normal stars harbored such worlds.

An Abundance of Exoplanets Changes our Universe (Scientific American)

Paper on direct imaging of exoplanets

Some takeaways on direct imaging of exoplanets from a scientific paper at arXiv:

Extra-solar planets or candidates as close to their host star as the Solar System planets (within
30 AU) are still very rare with β Pic b, HR 8799 e, PZ Tel B/b, and HR 8799 d being the only exceptions at 8.5, 14.3, 18.3, and 24.2 AU, respectively, all nearby young stars (19 to 52 pc). As far as angular separation is concerned, the closest planets or candidates imaged directly are PZ Tel B/b, HR 8799 e, β Pic b, HR 8799 d, and GQ Lup b with separations from 0.36 to 0.75 arc sec. 

New AO imaging techniques like ADI, SAM, and locally optimized combination of images
have improved the ability to detect such planets. Future AO instruments at 8-meter ground-based telescopes will improve the accessible dynamic range even further. Imaging with a new space based telescope like JWST (Beichman et al., 2010) or AO imaging at an extremely large telescope of 30 to 40 meters would improve the situation significantly. Imaging detection of planets with much lower masses, like e.g. Earth-mass planets, might be possible with a space-based interferometer like Darwin or TPF, but also only around very nearby stars.

Direct Imaging of Extra-solar Planets - Homogeneous Comparison of Detected Planets and Candidates (via @AllPlanets)

Public planet hunting goes live on BBC, participant discovers planet

As long as I can name my own planets, I want in! Following previous news that Planethunters.org gets +1million classifications, the BBC reports:

The public push initiated on BBC Two's Stargazing Live series to find planets beyond our Solar System has had an immediate result.

A viewer who answered the call has helped spot a world that appears to be circling a star dubbed SPH10066540.

The planet is described as being similar in size to our Neptune and circles its parent every 90 days.

Chris Holmes from Peterborough found it by looking through time-lapsed images of stars on Planethunters.org.

The website hosts data gathered by Nasa's Kepler space telescope, and asks volunteers to sift the information for anything unusual that might have been missed in a computer search.

"I've never had a telescope. I've had a passing interest in where things are in the sky, but never had any more knowledge about it than that," Mr Holmes told BBC News.

"Being involved in a project like this and actually being the one to find something is a very exciting position."

Chris Lintott from Oxford University who helps organise Planethunters.org added: "We're ecstatic. We've been groaning under the strain of all these people who want to help us, which is exactly how it should be."

The public participation project was launched last year, but it got a huge fillip when it was featured in the popular Stargazing series' return to BBC Two on Monday.

Volunteers have tripled to more than 100,000 people, and the number of images inspected has now reached a million.

Stargazing viewer in planet coup

Exoplanets have sunsets too, although their color might be a bit offsetting

Ever wondered what a sunset (or rather, starset) will look like on an exoplanet? A new website, exoclimes.com, has been launched that "is devoted to discussion around the study of planetary atmospheres outside the Solar System":

Extrasolar planets orbit stars, in a similar way to the Earth orbiting the Sun. Professor Frédéric Pont of the University of Exeter has used the extrasolar planets' 'transmission spectrum', taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, to work out the colour of the 'sunsets' created by these stars.

Writing on the website exoclimes.com, where he has posted the two sunset images he has produced, Professor Pont said:  "Unlike its sister planet HD '189, the planet HD '209 ('Osiris') has a sunset that looks truly alien. The star is white outside the atmosphere, since its temperature is close to that of the Sun. It then acquires a bluish tinge as it sinks deeper, because the absorption by the broad wings of the neutral sodium lines (the spectral lines responsible for the gloomy orange of sodium street lighting) remove the red and orange from the star light.

"One key difference with a sunset on Earth is that the 'sun' is much larger from '209, because the planet is very close. Instead of changing colour as it moves near the horizon, the host star spans all colours at once."

The Science of Sunsets