COROT Mission Launched

~And now for some news...in SCIENCE! A space telescope called "Corot" (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) was launched from Kazakhstan on December 27th to search for more planets beyond our solar system.

For those of you behind the times, extrasolar planets have already been discovered by the hundreds (209 at the most recent count!), but most of them are very strange compared to the planets near Earth. Planets astronomers have found orbiting other stars tend to be massive, typically several times the size of Jupiter (the largest planet in our solar system). Most also orbit very close to a star, making them intensely hot. The Corot mission planners hope to locate more "Earth-like" planets; the smallest "exoplanet" found so far is five times the size of Earth.

How it works: the telescope will peer at distant stars, looking for tiny decreases in light caused by a planet passing between the star and the telescope's line of sight. Because this is such a rare event, the telescope will survey tens of thousands of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The mission also has a second objective: to learn more about stars themselves. It will do this with a fascinating technique called "stellar seismology", which involves measuring sound waves that ripple across the surface of stars (let's call them "starquakes") to infer what lies deeper in the stellar interior. Although the basic physics of stellar anatomy are well-known, the actual composition and structure of stars beyond our own sun is in many was still a mystery.

The Corot mission is scheduled to last for 2.5 years. I hope the telescope will find many new planets and help astronomers learn more about what makes stars tick. I'll be following this mission with great interest. ~Oyasumi!