10 new planets found outside solar system

Scientist from the University of Oxford and an international team has discovered 10 new planets outside our solar system.

CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and Transits) space telescope, operated by the French space agency CNES were used to detect the new planets. CoRoT discovered planets outside our solar system - exoplanets - when they ‘transit’, which is passing in front of their stars, the University of Oxford released said on Wednesday.

Out of the 10 new exoplanets (CoRoT-16 b through to 24b and c) there are two Neptune-sized planets, a planet slightly smaller than Saturn and seven hot Jupiters some of which are unusually dense and/or on unusually elongated orbits, and one is in orbit around an unusually young star, the University of Oxford said in a release.

The new planets discovered were announced at the Second CoRoT Symposium, held in Marseille on June 14.

CoRoT-18 b is special because its star might be quite young. Finding planets around young stars are particularly interesting because planets evolve very fast initially, before settling into a much steadier pattern of evolution,” Dr Suzanne Aigrain of Oxford University's department of physics, lead UK scientist for CoRoT, said.

She added: If we want to understand the conditions in which planets form, we need to catch them within the first few hundred million years.”After that, the memory of the initial conditions is essentially lost.

If the age of the CoRoT-18 is confirmed, we could learn a lot about its formation and early evolution of hot gas giant planets by comparing the size of CoRoT-18 b to the predictions of theoretical models, Suzanne said.