Highly inflated Jupiters
Monday, December 10, 2012 - 09:30
in Astronomy & Space
There are currently 851 confirmed extra-solar planets. Of these, 289 were detected because their orbits (as seen from Earth) take them across the face of their host star, dimming the star's light in a transit event. The Kepler satellite has provided the largest set of transiting extra-solar planets and, if the list is expanded to include candidate planets (that is, planets spotted but not yet confirmed), it contains several thousand objects. Of the 289 confirmed transiting planets though, 194 were found with ground-based telescopes.