As scientists improve on our ability to detect extrasolar planets and launch new observatories like the Kepler, the collection of exoplanets continues to rise. But, so far, we haven’t been able to say a whole lot about them, other than their apparent mass and distance from the host star. That’s slowly beginning to change, as today’s issue of Nature contains a report of the first observation of phases in an extrasolar planet. And although this discovery could be expected, other research suggests that the techniques involved may ultimately help future instruments identify oceans on distant planets.

The recent discovery was made using the European Space Agency’s orbiting CoRoT observatory, which couples a small telescope to a wide-field camera. That camera can observe thousands of stars at once, and CoRoT began picking up transiting planets very shortly after it became operational back in 2007. The new data is based on continual observation of one of its own discoveries, CoRoT-1b, which belongs to a class of planets called “hot Jupiters.” These are gas giants that orbit close in to their host star, and tend to be one of the easiest things to detect. In this case, researchers performed 55 days of near-continuous observations, enough to follow 36 orbits of CoRoT-1b. (For anyone concerned that we were wasting time staring at something we already knew was there, rest assured that CoRoT was able to keep a digital eye on 12,000 or so other stars at the same time.)

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