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\nEarlier this week, we described a brief announcement from the team behind the Kepler space observatory, designed to spot the transit of planets in front of their host stars. That announcement was followed up by a paper in Thursday’s issue of Science<\/em>, which provided a few more details on some of the planets and other things that have been spotted within its field of view. But that paper was really a vehicle for a massive information dump; it contains information about 22 papers submitted to the Astrophysics Journal<\/em>, many of which have been posted on an arXiv preprint server<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \nMany of these describe the instrument aboard the Kepler in greater detail, and others the scientific pipeline that handles the data it returns—eliminating false positives and coordinating follow-up observations are central to the process. One paper<\/a> lists the follow-up resources available to the team, which include the Hubble and Spitzer in space, and Hawaii’s Keck telescope back on Earth. As of the end of 2009, there were already 177 items that were in or had been through the planetary pipeline. Five of these have already been confirmed to be signals from planets, and another 52 appear to be promising candidates. Another 65 are still under observation, status unknown.\n<\/p>\n
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