ESO begins era or incredible exoplanet discoveries.

I stumbled across the European Southern Observatory's publication
(it's a big .pdf file!)

http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/mess...ger-no.114.pdf

I saw this publication via a link on the Extrasolar Planets
Encyclopaedia which said that the new HARPS project had already bagged
their first exoplanet since going into business in October.

The most interesting article (for me) was the one on the HARPS "planet
hunting machine" which seems to be sensitive enough to find planets of
only a few Earth masses. Some of the veterans of that project have
already bagged quite a few exoplanets already, and no doubt they'll be
cranking out quite a few discoveries in the immediate future. Also in
that publication were articles about the Very Large Telescope
Interferometer (VLTI), another on the Cryogenic Infra-Red Echelle
Spectrometer (CIRES), adaptive optics hardware being tested out, and
the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) ground-breaking and much
more!

I know that ESO has done alot in the past, but I think that this is
the dawn of a golden age of exoplanet discovery for ESO, and that they
will be able to characterize quite a few exoplanets before the next
space-based telescopes get off the ground (yes this is conjecture, but
it seems like a safe bet!)

Regards, Jason H.