(PLANETQUEST) -- Hot off the heels of the Kepler mission's first images of the sky, the exoplanet world has been buzzing with new discoveries and tantalizing breakthroughs.
Sweet success - first exoplanet discovered with astrometry
Astronomers have long theorized that it's possible to find exoplanets using astrometry - the technique of measuring the position of stars very precisely and watching for the "wobble" caused by the gravity of exoplanets.
Now, planet hunting with astrometry is a reality. In late May, a pair of astronomers who had been collecting astrometric information at the Palomar observatory in California announced that they had discovered a large exoplanet orbiting the tiny star VB 10.
The discovery builds anticipation for NASA's SIM Lite mission, which will use extremely precise astrometry to look for Earth-sized planets close to our own solar system
VB 10 is now officially the smallest star to be found with an orbiting exoplanet - further evidence that exoplanets, once thought to be rare, can form around many types of stars.
Wax and wane - scientists observe exoplanet phases for the first time
The sight of a slowly disappearing or reappearing moon is a familiar sight here on Earth, and now scientists have observed the same phenomenon on a planet orbiting another star.
Like many other so-called "hot Jupiters," CoRoT-1b is thought to have a scorching hot "dayside" that always faces its host star, and a pitch-black "nightside" that is much cooler.
Astronomers observing the CoRoT-1 system were able to measure the rise and fall of light as the planet's bright daytime side rotated out of view, exposing the dark nightside of the planet to Earth.
The discovery marks the first time astronomers have been able to detect the changing phases of an exoplanet.
Flash judgement - astronomers search for exoplanets in other galaxies
Gravitational lensing - a phenomenon that occurs when the gravity of an exoplanet momentarily focuses the light of a faraway star - has been used to spot a handful of planets in our own galaxy, but a group of Swiss astronomers hope to use the same technique to find exoplanets in galaxies besides our own.
Their task won't be easy: a gravitational lensing event appears as a flash of starlight and, once it's over, doesn't happen again. Finding these events in other galaxies is even harder, because the stars are millions of light years away and practically impossible to focus on individually.
But the team may have already had its first successful find - a lensing event that was observed in 2004 is being re-analyzed with the suspicion that it may have actually been caused by a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. A confirmed result would be the first time planet-hunting has been performed at an intergalactic level.
An odd duck - a new planet with a wacky orbit
Add another planet to the oddball file.Astronomers recently discovered an exoplanet that orbits its host star at a crazily-tilted orbit.
Most planets orbit their stars around the star's equator, but XO-3b orbits a plane that's tilted 37 degrees from normal. The skewed orbit made it a tricky planet to observe - and also indicates that the planet was likely thrown off its normal orbit after it collided with an object in space.
Scientists were surprised to find that the planet, which is some 13 times the size of Jupiter and takes a paltry 3.5 days to orbit its host star, had such a wildly abnormal orbit. In our own solar system, only the dwarf planet Pluto has a non-standard orbit, though not nearly as skewed as XO-3b.
Written by Joshua Rodriguez/PlanetQuest
