Slashdot Mirror
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."
No, just relevant information. Headlines equating specifics of astronomical discoveries to fast-food meals is way too much dumbing-down for me.
But then why should I bother learning about science when Discovery Channel is showing another brain-dead documentory rephrasing the same 3 misleading facts 500 times for an hour, with a 3D animation repeated every 30 secounds to prevent viewers from daring to use even a small amount of imagniation.