Astronomers Confirm 4 New Worlds

An international group of astronomers announces the discovery of four new worlds. These extrasolar planets were confirmed in the first few days of the year, and represent a promising start for a year that shapes itself up to be excellent for such investigations.

Suffice it to say that we left 2011 with a total of 716 confirmed alien worlds. While this figure may seem large at force, it pales in comparison to the 2,326 exoplanetary candidates that the NASA Kepler Telescope proposed throughout last year.

In 2012, astronomers plan to conduct a large number of verification studies, seeking to verify as many of these planets as possible. Statistically speaking, we could expect to see more than 80 percent of the Kepler proposals being verified.

The process is bound to take some time, primarily because verifying that a planet does exist around a star located hundreds of light-years away is not easy, but also due to the sheer number of worlds that need attention.

To make matters even more complicated, Kepler is expected to release at least one more batch of data before it goes offline. However, it could be that astronomers controlling the mission will have sufficient time to compile two datasets.

If that is the case, then we could expect to see at least a thousand more exoplanetary candidates, though that number may increase. At this point, there are 720 confirmed exoplanets, counting the four ones that were confirmed in 2012.

All the new celestial bodies, dubbed HAT-P-34b, HAT-P-35b, HAT-P-36b, and HAT-P-37, are located extremely close to their parent stars, orbiting them in just 5.5, 3.6, 1.3 and 2.8 days, respectively. For comparison, Mercury takes nearly 88 days to complete an orbit around the Sun.

All were found with the HATNet project, a network of ground-based telescopes operated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The array discovered its first alien world, HAT-P-1b, about 6 years ago.

All the four worlds are hot-Jupiter-class planets, meaning that they are gas giants orbiting extremely close to their parent stars. This makes them tidally locked to the cosmic fireballs, meaning that they always keep the same face oriented towards the Sun, Universe Today reports.