Dec 2004. Sky & Telescope, pp. 18-19. Tiny Telescope Finds Big Planet. - ROBERT NAEYE. A small sky-patrol scope claims an exoplanet prize. ... an international team recently turned up a "hot Jupiter" using a 4-inch telescope and mostly off-the-shelf equipment. In fact, discovery team co-leader Timothy Brown (National Center for Atmospheric Research) made the telescope's optics in the garage of his Colorado home. "I have been an amateur telescope maker a long time," says Brown. "I couldn't find the parts I needed at a reasonable price, so I built them myself."
...The discovery heralds a new era when small telescopes doing wide-field surveys will turn up many new exoplanets (August issue, page 30). Roi Alonso (Astrophysical Institute of the Canaries) discovered this one using Brown's telescope, named STARE, on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.
...three telescopes imaged the field every two minutes all night long for two months, and software sifted through the mass of data to detect 16 stars that showed telltale evidence of transits. ...David Latham (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and his colleagues took low-resolution spectra of the 16 stars with 60-inch telescopes and found, from the high orbital velocities, that most were ordinary eclipsing binaries. But one stood out: an obscure, 11.8-magnitude Ko dwarf named GSC 02652-01324, located 500 light-years from Earth. ...See More Excerpt

Oct 6, 2004. Bryce Unruh, project engineer at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., receives the Medallion Award by his undergraduate institution, Tabor College according to the Hillsboro, Kansas newspaper. He leads a team of engineers which designs, builds and tests flight avionics hardware and software for the Kepler mission.

Sep. 01, 2004. Earthlike planets may be plentiful. By Glennda Chui. Mercury News. Until now, the search for planets around other stars turned up only giant balls of gas, the likes of Jupiter and Saturn, that bear no resemblance to our own world. Now astronomers based in Berkeley, Texas and Europe have found three much smaller planets, each about the mass of Neptune, that could be made of rock, ice or both.

August 23, 2004. TrES-1: The Transiting Planet of a Bright K0V Star
[pdf] Timothy M. Brown, David W. Latham, David Charbonneau, et al. We report the detection of a transiting Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a relatively bright (V = 11.79) K0V star. We detected the transit light-curve signature in the course of the TrES multi-site transiting planet survey, and confirmed the planetary nature of the companion via multicolor photometry and precise radial velocity measurements. We designate the planet TrES-1; its inferred mass is 0.75 ±0.07 MJup, its radius is 1.08+0.18−0.04 RJup, and its orbital period is 3.030065±0.000008 days. This planet has an orbital period similar to that of HD 209458b, but about twice as long as those of the OGLE transiting planets. Its mass is indistinguishable from that of HD 209458b, but its radius is significantly smaller and fits the theoretical models without the need for an additional source of heat deep in the atmosphere, as has been invoked by some investigators for HD 209458b.

August 2004. COSMIC Cowboy. by Kay Randall, Univ. Texas, Astrobiology Magazine - USA "When you discover a new planetary system, you are overwhelmed and sit and think, here is an entire new world, and I'm the only one who knows about it at this moment."... If you corner an astronomer like Dr. Bill Cochran and talk to him for an hour or two, suddenly life in outer space, for example, doesn't seem nearly so improbable. Cochran, who is a senior research scientist in the College of Natural Sciences' Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, believes it's an exciting time to be studying the sky and stars and that the future is much, much closer than most of us think. ... To accomplish this second stage of planet discovery, Cochran is working with NASA on the Kepler Mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2007 and search for ...

July 09, 2004 NASA Editorial Response: Solar System Exploration: More to Come from SpaceRef.com -- The Times' editorial on our trailblazing Saturn mission ("Through Saturn's Rings, July 1, 2004) eloquently captured the excitement and wonder attendant to NASA's Cassini mission to the ringed planet. ... The one aspect the Times misstated is that Cassini "may be the last of its kind, now that a new austerity in space exploration has set in." To the contrary, bold new planetary exploration missions are planned... Beyond the Mars missions, add the upcoming Messenger mission to Mercury, the deployment of the Kepler telescope, the completion and launch of the new James Webb space telescope early in the next decade, and the list goes on and on.

27 May 2004 Spitzer Spies Planet Formation (CNN article) -- http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/05/27/baby.solar.systems/

2 May 2004 History of Planet Transits by Joe Rao.

15 April 2004 JPL Press Release: Cosmic Magnifying Glass: Distant Star Reveals Planet. Like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass to unveil hidden clues, modern day astronomers used cosmic magnifying effects to reveal a planet orbiting a distant star. This marks the first discovery of a planet around a star beyond Earth's solar system using gravitational microlensing. A star or planet can act as a cosmic lens to magnify and brighten a more distant star lined up behind it. The gravitational field of the foreground star bends and focuses light, like a glass lens bending and focusing starlight in a telescope. Albert Einstein predicted this effect in his theory of general relativity and confirmed it with our Sun. "The real strength of microlensing is its ability to detect low-mass planets," said Dr. Ian Bond of the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh, Scotland, lead author of a paper appearing in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

2 February 2004. DYING Planet Leaks Carbon-Oxygen. Astrobiology Magazine - USA... NASA's planned Kepler mission will monitor thousands of stars over a four-year period, searching for transiting planets.

2 February 2004. Oxygen and Carbon Found in Atmosphere of an Extrasolar Planet. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected, for the first time ever, the presence of oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.