james_nicoll

If you're suggesting a general rule, we should consider other examples of planets that weren't real planets.

1) Ceres, Juno, Pallas, and Vesta were considered planets for about 50 years, but then they were demoted, and they were all discovered by Germans.

2) Planets were widely thought to exist for awhile around Barnard's star, 61 Cygni, and other nearby stars, thanks to Peter van de Kamp. His claims were later refuted. He was Dutch, but he made his claims while working from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

3) When you read about "the first extrasolar planets", 51 Peg gets most of the attention, and people tend to forget about the planets of pulsar PSR B1257+12, found three years earlier. As further evidence that the pulsar planets don't count, consider all the fanfare made about finding the first earth-size and sub-earth-size planets. PSR B1257+12 A is far smaller than the Earth (twice the size of the moon) but everyone discounts it. So who discovered it? Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail. Wolszczan is Polish and Frail is Canadian. But like Peter van de Kamp, they did their work in Pennsylvania.

Hmmm, I thought I'd come up with more examples. We need more data!

Oh! There's Nibiru. But was it invented by Zecharia Sitchin, an Azerbaijani-born US citizen working in New York (not all that far from Pennsylvania), or was it invented by the (non-American) Sumerians?

Edited at 2013-01-04 11:01 am (UTC)

The word "habitable" appears 62 times in that AAS PDF. There are 38 appearances of "habitable zone" and two appearances of "habitable-zone."

"Laser frequency comb" appears twice.

The abstract contains this interesting sentence, with an acronym I haven't seen before:

Tidally heated exomoons, or THEMs, can conceivably be much more luminous than their host exoplanet and as little as 1000 times dimmer than the system's primary star.

I was also interested to learn that Penn State University now has a Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, and that Alexander Wolszczan-- lead discoverer of the first extrasolar planet-- works there. So does Steinn Sigurdsson. Both astronomers, as I recall and as gohover might too, corresponded on Usenet in its glory days.

Edited at 2013-01-04 03:36 pm (UTC)

I'm all for inclusive language, but I think this may be taking sensitivity training too far.

The linked article is discussing a data set that is not at all ready to be called "discovery of some exoplanets" yet, but which may eventually be shown to contain some exoplanets. The author is impatiently fooling around with the data anyway. As one does.

Edited at 2013-01-04 07:31 pm (UTC)