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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."
I haven't been following this news too closely, so could someone please tell me if they've found any planets that are the size of earth? not 13 earth masses, but somewhere between 0.5 and 2 earth masses would be nice. I know that life can exist outside of conditions found on the earth, but it would be really cool to find intelligent life like ourselves. I'm not sure what evolution did on other planets, but I'd like to see what kind of muscles developed on organisms that lived on a planet with 13 times the mass of the earth.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
-1: Flamebait
Hey, hey, hey, just because somebody has a critical opinion on something dose not make them flamebait!
Come on, everyone knows science is incremental. 99% of progress is unremarkable in and of itself, but quite often the process involved allows greater leaps to occur. For instance, the microlensing they are using in these systems are a good advance in optics -- now what other uses can we think of? And that doesn't even count what we can't even predict.
I would agree with you here but, the focus of the story is not the optic technology used in this find; it's the useless planet.
The tech of the find is thrown in the story like packing peanuts, just filling space, and is overshadowed by the icy-rocky-planet-thingy.
Your attitude is just demonstrative of what is wrong with people today, they cannot think past the immediate, and certainly don't understand how we got to where we are today (hint: it's not by only making major breakthroughs).
Nope sorry, didn't miss the interesting optic comments in the story, but this was not billed as a story about how they found the planet.
Plus I am not only looking for major breakthroughs here, just tired of hearing the same story rehashed every 2 weeks.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
Hi, everyone. I wrote one of the original news releases about this planet discovery, so I'm very interested in the discussion of whether the "super-Earth" is exciting news or not. When I first found out about the planet (I work at Ohio State University; one of our astronomers heads the team that identified it) I knew I had to write a news release (I mean, this is a new planet!) but I also had to wonder how much of a splash the story would make in the media.
Some 170 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the last decade, so there's already been a lot of news coverage. But it's easy to forget that before a decade ago, scientists had no real evidence of what other solar systems are like. This planet is unusual in that it's terrestrial, and its solar system doesn't seem to have any giant gas planets like Jupiter. So the find expands our ideas about what kinds of solar systems are out there, and it also suggests that we're getting closer to our goal of finding other Earth-mass planets.
There's more information in the Ohio State news release, and the one written by my colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There are also lots of other news stories out there right now, most notably by New Scientist, National Geographic, and Space.com.
Pam Gorder