Exoplanet discoveries with the CoRoT space observatory

The CoRoT space observatory is a project which is led by the French space agency CNES and leading space research institutes in Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Germany and Spain and also the European Space Agency ESA. CoRoT observed since its launch in December 27, 2006 about 100 000 stars for the exoplanet channel, during 150 days uninterrupted high-precision photometry. Since the The CoRoT-team has several exoplanet candidates which are currently analyzed under its study, we report here the discoveries of nine exoplanets which were observed by CoRoT. Discovered exoplanets such as CoRoT-3b populate the brown dwarf desert and close the gap of measured physical properties between usual gas giants and very low mass stars. CoRoT discoveries extended the known range of planet masses down to about 4.8 Earth-masses (CoRoT-7b) and up to 21 Jupiter masses (CoRoT-3b), the radii to about 1.68 x 0.09 R (Earth) (CoRoT-7b) and up to the most inflated hot Jupiter with 1.49 x 0.09 R (Earth) found so far (CoRoT-1b), and the transiting exoplanet with the longest period of 95.274 days (CoRoT-9b). Giant exoplanets have been detected at low metallicity, rapidly rotating and active, spotted stars. Two CoRoT planets have host stars with the lowest content of heavy elements known to show a transit hinting towards a different planethost-star-metallicity relation then the one found by radial-velocity search programs. Finally the properties of the CoRoT-7b prove that rocky planets with a density close to Earth exist outside the Solar System. Finally the detection of the secondary transit of CoRoT-1b at a sensitivity level of 10(-5) and the very clear detection of the ""super-Earth"" CoRoT-7b at 3.5 x 10(-4) relative flux are promising evidence that the space observatory is being able to detect even smaller exoplanets with the size of the Earth.

Taking advantage of contextualized interactions while users watch TV

While watching TV, viewers use the remote control to turn the TV set on and off, change channel and volume, to adjust the image and audio settings, etc. Worldwide, research institutes collect information about audience measurement, which can also be used to provide personalization and recommendation services, among others. The interactive digital TV offers viewers the opportunity to interact with interactive applications associated with the broadcast program. Interactive TV infrastructure supports the capture of the user-TV interaction at fine-grained levels. In this paper we propose the capture of all the user interaction with a TV remote control-including short term and instant interactions: we argue that the corresponding captured information can be used to create content pervasively and automatically, and that this content can be used by a wide variety of services, such as audience measurement, personalization and recommendation services. The capture of fine grained data about instant and interval-based interactions also allows the underlying infrastructure to offer services at the same scale, such as annotation services and adaptative applications. We present the main modules of an infrastructure for TV-based services, along with a detailed example of a document used to record the user-remote control interaction. Our approach is evaluated by means of a proof-of-concept prototype which uses the Brazilian Digital TV System, the Ginga-NCL middleware.