The first planets discovered from space with the CoRoT mission

The pioneer space mission for photometric planet searches CoRoT continuously monitors about 12,000 stars in each of its fields of view. Thanks to the so-called "alarm mode", transit candidates can be detected early in the processing of the data and before the end of a run of observation. This specificity offers the possibility of rapidly triggering follow-up operations for the confirmation and characterization of the best transit candidates. We present the first objects discovered in this way: four planets and a transition object between brown dwarf and planet. We describe the organization of the CoRoT Exoplanet Science Team and briefly comment on the set of periodic signals identified by the various detection groups in the first three runs of observation.