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New Large Rocky Planet Found
An anonymous reader writes "Discovery News is reporting the discovery of a super-sized rocky planet orbiting a red-dwarf. The star is located about 9000 ly from the sun. The planet consists of rock and ice and orbits at around the distance of asteroid belt. The planet could not grow to Jupiter size because the star is small and the system ran out of gas. The planet is about 13 earth masses and was discovered using the microlensing technique. Since most of the stars in the Milky Way are smaller than the sun, we should expect more of similar findings."
AFAIK, none of the techniques we have right now can detect planets much smaller than the one they just found. The exciting thing is that every time the techniques get better, they immediately start finding bunches of new planets down to whatever the current limit is; which implies to me that once the resolution is fine enough, we'll probably be seeing ~Earth-mass planets all over the place.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You obviously never graded any of my homework. As an undergrad or graduate student. Or published journal articles. There's no official abbreviation, but it gets abbreviated 90% of the time. Like with seconds (s, sec, or even " seen frequently. Of course the last IS offical when describing divisions of an arc.) 'Lyrs' is also common.
only rarely seen lyrs, but I've seen ltyr frequently. ly is more common though. And yes, IAAA (I am an astrophysicist). You've also got pc which is parsec which has a geometrical meaning but is nothing but 3.26 ly.
for summary of discovered extrasolar planets (exoplanets) check
www.exoplanets.org
(it's not updated as frequently as news sites, but it IS maintained by astronomers, not someone making a quick buck...)
Unfortunately, no. Microlensing is a technique that allows us to find smaller planets than was previously possible. As planets go, the Earth is big on the rocky scale, but small compared to, say, Jupiter. It's no accident that extrasolar planets so far discovered are measured in terms of their size compared to Jupiter.
To discover Earth-sized planets required a space-based telescope network. The good news on this is that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been scoped, planned, costed and is ready to go. The bad news is that this project has been cancelled (the bureau-speak is "indefinitely postponed") so that another man can go plant a flag on the moon.
We will all have a long wait now to find other Earths.