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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."
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