18.04.10- Zeroing in on Nearby Exoplanets.

 
A scale comparison of a possible Super-Earth.
It’s hard to believe that a little less than two decades ago, no extra-solar planets were known. Now, the count climbs daily, and platforms like the Kepler Space Telescope threaten to launch the tally into the thousands. Recently, an international team of astronomers made six new discoveries in two nearby star [...]

19.10.09: 32 New Exoplanets Revealed!

Anybody notice the exoplanet tally on our front page hop up to 402 this morning? That’s because the European Southern Observatory (ESO) revealed a stunning 32 (count em!) new exoplanets identified this morning at their conference at Porto, Portugal. The discoveries were thanks to HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, a sensitive spectrograph [...]

23.9.9 CoRoT-7b: A Rare Earth.

The “Super-Earths” are getting smaller. Recently, the ESA announced that an exoplanet discovered on February 3rd of this year by the CoRoT (Convection Rotation and planetary Transit) satellite is one of the lightest yet… at about five Earth masses, this transiting exoplanet is about twice the diameter of the Earth. But don’t pack your bags [...]