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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?

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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.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.0282

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gbakos/

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