Exoplanetary discoveries, a question...

[vonmazur]

Fellows; Have any exoplanets been obseved in really long eccentric orbits yet? I mean almost what we would consider cometary tracks....I just have plowed thru a bunch of reports posted here, but my lack of understanding of the terminologies makes it hard for me to interpret them correctly...

I am aware that a transit has to occur to get a good idea of the orbital parameters, but just in case I missed something, I am asking those here who really know this subject...

TIA

Dale in AL

[EDG]

http://exoplanet.eu/catalog-all.php?&munit=&runit=&punit=&mode=-5&more=

Hopefully that link works - it should be listing all the planets at exoplanet.eu in order of decreasing orbital eccentricity (the ECC column). It looks like there are a quite a few that have been found with eccentricities above 0.5 (though I don't know how confirmed or preliminary that is). HD 4113 apparently has a planet with eccentricity of 0.903 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_4113_b)!

[vonmazur]

EDG Thanks, I will take a look...

Dale

[Jeff Root]

Very nice web page! A fairly large table that displayed almost instantly
even with my dialup connection. Cute little popup key to abbreviations.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[Hungry4info]

It looks like there are a quite a few that have been found with eccentricities above 0.5

For HD 80606 b, transits (both primary and secondary) have been observed, allowing its > 0.9 eccentricity to be constrained pretty well. It's well past 'preliminary' now.

[Jeff Root]

What?? They were able to detect the reduction in light when the planet
went behind the star??? Wow!

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[Hungry4info]

Such detections are frequently done for HD 209458 b and HD 189733 b, and have been reported for others: WASP-18 b, WASP-19 b, TrES-2 b, TrEs-3 b, Kepler-7 b, HD 80606 b, HAT-P-1 b, HAT-P-7 b, CoRoT-1 b, CoRoT-2 b, Gliese 436 b, and possibly Kepler-6 b (perhaps others... don't have a complete list with me at the moment).

Infrared phase curves HD 189733 b and υ And Ab exist, allowing for the location of their longitudinal "hot spots" to be located, in both cases the hot spots are observed to be pushed by winds away from the sub-stellar points.

[Jeff Root]

Wow!! The future has arrived!

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[EDG]

How does the planet get on such an eccentric orbit? I can imagine the Kozai mechanism messing up the planetary orbit if there's a distant stellar companion , but how would it get into such an orbit if the star was on its own?

[Hungry4info]

Perhaps planet-planet scattering. Formation via disk-instability. Perhaps even Kozai interactions between multiple, massive bodies formed in the same system.