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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."
As more of these planets are found using microlensing, perhaps someone could put together the "Rocky Planet Picture Show."
Sorry, had to do that.
We have found other planets like this before, this is not news.
Sure, to YOU it's just a dupe of celestial proportions.
But some of us are FROM Altair Centauri, and this is the first news item we've had in 9000 years, you insensitive clod.
Go back to your high school physics, g is proportional to the mass and the inverse of the distance squared. Assuming a sphere, mass equals density x 4/3 x pi x R^3. Apply the inverse R^2 term and you end up with g proportional to density x R.
The planet might be 13 times the mass but if the density is the same as Earth then g is only 2.35 times that of Earth (cube root of 13).
ZombieEngineer
intelligent life like ourselves
One of these things is not like the other.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I thought that was an abbreviation for 'politicians'. As in 'Tony Blair and George Bush are lyrs.'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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