via Astronomy Buzz;

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of ‘seismic’ information on a far away, Sun-like star, with unexpected accuracy.

The ESA (European Space Agency) satellite COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) is designed in part to measure the variations in light waves from stars when an exoplanet transits its stellar parent. This can be summed up simply with the following image from the ESA;

The first planet imaged is a gas giant with a radius 1.78 times that of Jupiter (or 127,255 km), which completes an orbit of its star every 36 hours.

The exceptionally cool thing about these results is the accuracy to which this luminescent variance has been measured. So accurate that imaging a planet the size of the Earth is possible. From the ESA Portal;

The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets - perhaps even as small as Earth - and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition.

Measuring the variance in the light frequencies is a good way of determining the composition of something as light passes through. This means that determining the make-up of a rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere is perhaps possible with COROT.

COROT could herald a new age of exoplanet discovery, which is awesome. We need a new home.