Sunday, June 10, 2012

Some Giant Exoplanets Misclassified as Planets

Some newfound planets are something else
Re-evaluation suggests one-third of hot giant orbs are misclassified
 
Web edition : Thursday, June 7th, 2012

When the Kepler spacecraft finds a giant planet closely orbiting a star, there’s a one in three chance that it’s not really a planet at all.
At least, that’s the case according to a new study that put some of Kepler’s thousands of candidate planets to the test using a complementary method for discovering celestial objects in stellar orbits. The results, posted June 5 on arXiv.org, suggest that 35 percent of candidate giants snuggled close to bright stars are impostors, known in the planet-hunting business as false-positives.
“Estimating the Kepler false-positive rate is one of the most burning questions in this field,” says astronomer Jean-Michel Désert of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has performed similar calculations for smaller planets.

MORE: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341328/title/Some_newfound_planets_are_something_else

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