Nature has sent reporter Eric Hand to cover the 2010 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. As Hand admits, this isn’t a huge ask as both he and the conference are calling Washington home at the moment, “so instead of tumbling down to the conference from a warm hotel room, I had a lung-scouring walk to the hotel against the wind in 20 degree weather”.

While our sub-editors take him to task for using Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, you can enjoy his first proper blog post of the meeting which outlines the much touted discovery of five new large exo-planets by NASA’s Kepler mission.

“One of the hot Jupiters has a density as fluffy as styrofoam. Some of them are hotter than molten lead. Looking at them is like looking into a ‘blast furnace’, says [mission scientist Bill] Borucki. Overall, the discoveries serve notice: Kepler is in action,” he writes.

“The finds themselves? Not so special really.”

He does note that the discoveries are interesting in showing the so-called ‘Neptune Gap’ is real (see full post for more).

Follow Eric on our In the Field blog as he braves the freezing weather in search of science that is really special.

Image: artist’s impression of Jupiter-like planet / NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)