Re: paper on transits by extrasolar planets in OGLE data

[Chris Albertson <chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com>]

This is very good news for people who believe planets are common.
Out of 52000 stars they found  42 planets  That is on order of
one in every thousand. 

Here's a question:  If _every_ star had a Jupiter sized planet
and the orbital planes were random with respect to our line of
sight what fraction of the stars _could_ show a transit?  I'll
have to draw some diagrams and think about the geometry but I think
there may be an argument that Jupiters are present around
_most_ stars.  It is almost hard to believe the 42 out of 52000
results I'd expect one in a million.  Are you sure someone din't
drop three zeroes some place?


--- Stupendous Man <richmond@a188-l009.rit.edu> wrote:
> 
>   Check out the paper by Udalski et al., available from
> the astro-ph preprint server:
> 
>      http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0202320
> 
> From the abstract:
> 
>     Photometric observations of three fields in the direction of
>     the Galactic center (800 epochs per field) were collected on 32
> nights
>     during time interval of 45 days. Out of the total of 5 million
> stars
>     monitored, about 52000 Galactic disk stars with photometry better
> than
>     1.5% were analyzed for flat-bottomed eclipses with the depth
> smaller
>     than 0.08 mag. 
>     Altogether 46 stars with transiting low-luminosity objects were
>     detected. For 42 of them multiple transits were observed, a total
> of 185,
<SNIP>

=====
Chris Albertson 
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson@aero.org

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/