I have a question to astrophysicists: what drives the progress in knowing more and more details about smaller and farther planets? Better precision of instruments? Computational power of computers? Better statistical models?
Progress on all fronts is driving the progress in exoplanets. The Kepler space telescope has been a huge driver, and Hubble, Spitzer, and big ground-based telescopes have played a big role; this new discovery is based on Hubble and Spitzer data runs plus comparison with Kepler data. Exoplanet search will take a giant leap with the planned launch of the TESS space telescope in 2017.
But this exoplanet was first discovered by a small network of at the time 6 extremely modest telescopes (just 110mm / ~4.3 inch objective diameter) automatically controlled by one Linux box in a project built by Gaspar Bakos when he was a student in Hungary.
