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[h2]Posted: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 1:00 PM by Alan Boyle [/h2]
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David A. Aguilar / CfA
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An artist's conception shows the planet known as GJ 1214b passing across the disk
of its parent star, a red dwarf just one-fifth as big as our sun.
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Astronomers say they have detected a planet just six and a half times as massive as Earth - at a distance so close its atmosphere could be studied, and with a density so low it's almost certain to have abundant water.
The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"Astronomically speaking, this is on our block," David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the study, told reporters this week. "This is a next-door neighbor. For perspective, our own TV signals have already passed beyond the distance of this star."
He said the planet was detected using an array of eight off-the-shelf, 16-inch telescopes equipped with commercially available cameras.
"Since we found the super-Earth using a small ground-based telescope, this means that anyone else with a similar telescope and a good CCD camera can detect it too," Charbonneau said in a news release. "Students around the world can now study this super-Earth."
Super-Earths - planets that are roughly two to 10 times Earth's mass - represent the hottest frontier in the years-long search for worlds beyond our solar system. Planet-hunters reported finding their first transiting super-Earth in February, and earlier this week, other researchers added two more super-Earths to the list.
Story continues
That's some out there #+!#
