Nearly all the extrasolar planets discovered have been Jupiter-sized or larger. But astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics think that super-earths - rocky planets several times larger that our planet - might actually be much more common. Based on the recent discovery of a super-earth around a red dwarf star 9,000 light-years away, the research team calculated that there are probably 3 times as many of these planets than the larger gas giants.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Super Earths Might Be Common
3 comments:
What amazes me as much as these discoveries themselves (not one but two Neptune-sized "super earths" so far) is the method used detect them. Using gravitational lensing to detect something this relatively small at distances of several hundred light years (and possibly in the future several million light years into the next galaxy!) strikes me as akin to invoking the Black Arts.
I'm amazed how they can tell the size and distance from it's host star a planet can be from a distance of 9,000 light years.
I don't know a lot about it, but surely it will only be a matter of time before an Earth sized planet is found closer to it's star...
akin to invoking the Black Arts
And no doubt, to some Fundies, it's precisely that.