CoRoT was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly those of large terrestrial size, and to perform asteroseismology by measuring solar-like oscillations in stars. The mission was led by the French Space Agency (CNES) in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) and other international partners.
Hot Jupiters are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital periods. The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere temperatures resulted in their informal name "hot Jupiters".
Didier Patrick Queloz is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.
WASP or Wide Angle Search for Planets is an international consortium of several academic organisations performing an ultra-wide angle search for exoplanets using transit photometry. The array of robotic telescopes aims to survey the entire sky, simultaneously monitoring many thousands of stars at an apparent visual magnitude from about 7 to 13.
Pollux b, formally named Thestias, is an exoplanet candidate orbiting the star Pollux approximately 34 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini. It is also designated β Geminorum b or HD 62509 b. If this planet exists, it has a minimum mass of about twice the mass of Jupiter, and it moves around Pollux in 1.61 years at a distance of 1.64 AU in a nearly circular orbit. However, its existence has been disputed.
HD 118203 is a star with an orbiting exoplanet located in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Major. It has the proper name Liesma, which means flame, and it is the name of a character from the Latvian poem Staburags un Liesma. The name was selected in the NameExoWorlds campaign by Latvia, during the 100th anniversary of the IAU.
CoRoT-2b is the second extrasolar planet to be detected by the French-led CoRoT mission, and orbits the star CoRoT-2 at a distance of 700 light years from Earth towards the constellation Aquila. Its discovery was announced on 20 December 2007. After its discovery via the transit method, its mass was confirmed via the radial velocity method.
XO-2 is a binary star system about 490 light-years away in the constellation Lynx. It consists of two components, XO-2N and XO-2S, both of which host planetary systems.
Kepler-17 is a main-sequence yellow dwarf star that is much more active than the Sun with starspots covering roughly 6% of its surface. Starspots are long-lived, with at least one persisting for 1400 days.
Planet Hunters is a citizen science project to find exoplanets using human eyes. It does this by having users analyze data from the NASA Kepler space telescope and the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It was launched by a team led by Debra Fischer at Yale University, as part of the Zooniverse project.
Catherine Heymans is a British astrophysicist, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and a professor at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
Kepler-88 is a G-type star 1,230 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra, with three confirmed exoplanets. SIMBAD lists a subgiant spectral type of G8IV, while other sources give it a main sequence spectral type of G6V. The latter is more consistent with its properties.
Kepler-102 is a star 353 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra. Kepler-102 is less luminous than the Sun. The star system does not contain any observable amount of dust. Kepler-102 is suspected to be orbited by a binary consisting of two red dwarf stars, at projected separations of 591 and 627 AU.
David Robert Ciardi is an American astronomer. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy from Boston University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wyoming in 1997.
The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets. The facility is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, about 2 km from ESO's Very Large Telescope and 0.5 km from the VISTA Survey Telescope. Science operations began in early 2015. The astronomical survey is managed by a consortium of seven European universities and other academic institutions from Chile, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Prototypes of the array were tested in 2009 and 2010 on La Palma, and from 2012 to 2014 at Geneva Observatory.
Catherine Jane Clarke is a Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. In 2017 she became the first woman to be awarded the Eddington Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2022 she became the first female director of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Carole Ann Haswell is a British astrophysicist and current Professor of Astrophysics and Head of Astronomy at the Open University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. She has been involved in the detection of several exoplanets, including Barnard's Star b.
Eric Agol is an American astronomer and astrophysicist who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.
WASP-80 is a K-type main-sequence star about 162 light-years away from Earth. The star's age is much younger than the Sun's at 1.352±0.222 billion years. WASP-80 could be similar to the Sun in concentration of heavy elements, although this measurement is highly uncertain.
