Sorry to come over all nitpicky in my first comment there – I was a bit annoyed with the ESA press people because I thought the way the release was worded (‘size’) was designed to encourage misunderstandings over mass and diameter, and to make it hard to do comparisons with other well-known small exoplanets.

Interestingly, the DPS 08 conference was streamed as live video on the internet, and then turned into downloadable movies. When what was streamed was things like Michael Mumma saying “Don’t tell anyone yet, but we’ve mapped methane on Mars”, it gets kind of interesting (I only found that after the public announcement myself).

JT – yes on the one hand it would be great to get “live updates” from a conference like that, and some meetings like the UK National Astronomy Meeting last year had a pretty lively blog (http://orbitingfrog.com/nam/). But scientists present a lot of early results at such meetings, that are perhaps unconfirmed and often unpublished. Widely publicising these on the internet is just not a good idea. It’s important that these symposia remain places where scientists can exchange results and information with scrutiny only from their peers, not the interweb-at-large, politicians etc.

This exoplanet discovery hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet, in fact no paper has even been submitted. So I thought carefully first about whether I even wanted to say something about it. In the end the large amount of ground-based data that has been collected by the team convinced me that they have gathered enough data to support their findings, and that the result will stand. But it would have been much nicer to read a paper than a bunch of press releases.

Thanks to check on the official press release, for example at:
http://www.obspm.fr/actual/nouvelle/feb09/exo7.en.shtml

Please check your information. This is possibly a first sign of the Exoplanet fatigue but possibly also of a more standard illness.

Anyway, I think that the fatigue will increase when Kepler will be launched with a lot of exoplanet discoveries.

http://exoplanet.eu/planet.php?p1=CoRoT-Exo-7&p2=b .