Ten New Planets

France's CoRoT satellite, which is similar to NASA's Kepler, has discovered ten new exoplanets. All are Neptune-sized or larger, but they exhibit a range of other characteristics. One is barely as dense as water, for example, while another has the density of a rocky world. One orbits a star twice as old as the Sun, while another orbits a star that is roughly 600 million years old-- a babe in the cosmic woods. Two have elongated orbits, which is interesting because such orbits are thought to be unstable.

These ten bring the number of confirmed exoplanets to 565.