27 February 2007

Exoplanet data

The furthest discovered exoplanet is OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, at 21,500±3,300 ly distance. However, it is an anomaly, as it was discovered using gravitational lensing, which I believe allows us to detect things much further away than the other methods, so the fact that most exoplanets have been discovered by other methods leads me to think I should throw out lensing-detected exoplanets.

Wikipedia also has a list of all 212 exoplanets discovered to date, that I intend to comb though. It occurs to me that if I do a rigorous job of this, I could submit it as a literature review to a peer-reviewed astronomy journal. One problem is (in addition to getting primary sources for the Wikipedia info) it would require me to confirm that no one else has published the same thing. To that effect, a couple links for me (and anyone else curious):

  • ADS Abs - a searchable archive of all published peer-reviewed astronomy papers. I think it stands for Astrophysical Database Service Abstracts, but I could be wrong. Hosted by Harvard.

  • Astro-ph - another searchable archive of astronomy papers, not as good a search engine, but includes papers that are in the process of peer-review and aren't yet published. Hosted by Los Alamos National Labs.

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