

Clear skies and steamy water vapour on a planet outside our solar system - dnetesn
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1420/

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mynegation
I have a question to astrophysicists: what drives the progress in knowing more
and more details about smaller and farther planets? Better precision of
instruments? Computational power of computers? Better statistical models?

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bfe
Progress on all fronts is driving the progress in exoplanets. The Kepler space
telescope has been a huge driver, and Hubble, Spitzer, and big ground-based
telescopes have played a big role; this new discovery is based on Hubble and
Spitzer data runs plus comparison with Kepler data. Exoplanet search will take
a giant leap with the planned launch of the TESS space telescope in 2017.

But this exoplanet was first discovered by a small network of at the time 6
extremely modest telescopes (just 110mm / ~4.3 inch objective diameter)
automatically controlled by one Linux box in a project built by Gaspar Bakos
when he was a student in Hungary.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0282](http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0282)

[http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/](http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/)

