[OT] First extrasolar Earth-type planet discovered?

This is OT for most things here, but for the vaccheads, and stellar
cartographers, mu Arae likely has several planets around it, including
this new large probably rocky planet. For the grunts and dirtsiders,
this gives Jon Davis' "Hot Spot" scenario (DSII, run at GZG ECC several
years consecutively) some validity. :-)

And as Beth can tell you, life has been found in some pretty
non-hospitable-
to-life regions on our own planet. Who knows what is living there...

Mk

(in other extrasolar planet news, there was an announcement earlier
this morning from the Lowell Observatory about their discovering a
new exo-planet using 4-inch telescopes - what does that say for astro-
cartographers of the GZGVerse for discovering new K'V worlds? ;-)

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http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/super_earth_040825.html

Super Earth' Discovered at Nearby Star

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 25 August 2004
10:06 am ET

European astronomers have discovered one of the smallest planets known
outside
our solar system, a world about 14 times the mass of our own. It could
be a
rocky planet with a thin atmosphere, a sort of "super Earth," the
researchers
said today.

This is no typical Earth, however. It completes its tight orbit in less
than 10
days, compared to the 365 required for our year. Its daytime face would
be
scorched.

It is not possible to know exact surface conditions of the planet, said
Portuguese researcher Nuno Santos, who led the discovery. "However, we
can
expect it to be quite hot, given the proximity to the star."

Hot as in around 1,160 degrees Fahrenheit (900 Kelvin), Santos told
SPACE.com.

Still, the discovery is a significant advance in technology that reveals
a
solar system slightly similar to our own in ways not seen until now.

The star is similar to our Sun and just 50 light-years away. A
light-year is
the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10
trillion
kilometers). Most of the known planets beyond the nine we're most
familiar with
are hundreds or thousands of light years distant.

The star, mu Arae, is visible under dark skies from the Southern
Hemisphere. It
harbors two other planets. One is Jupiter-sized and takes 650 days to
make its
annual trip around the star. The other is farther out and was confirmed
to
exist by the new observations.

Nearly all of the more than 120 planets found beyond our solar system
are
gaseous worlds as big or larger than Jupiter, mostly in tight orbits
that would
not permit a rocky planet to survive. Search techniques have so far not
allowed
the discovery of anything smaller than Saturn around Sun-like stars.

A trio of roughly Earth-sized planets was found to orbit a dense corpse
of star
known as a neutron star. They are oddballs, however, circling rapidly
around a
dark star that would not support life. Some planet hunters don't
consider these
three to be as important as planets around normal stars.

At 14 times the mass of Earth, the newfound planet -- circling a star
similar
in size and brightness to our Sun -- is about as heavy as Uranus, a
world of
gas and ice. Theorists say 14 Earth-masses is roughly the upper limit
for a
planet to possibly remain rocky, however. And because this planet is so
close
to its host star, it likely had a much different formation history than
Uranus.

In our solar system, the four innermost planets are all rocky.

The leading theory of planet formation has the gas giants forming from a
rocky
core, a process in which the core develops over time, then reaches a
tipping
point when gravity can rapidly collect a huge envelope of gas. This
theory
suggests the newfound planet never reached that critical mass, said
Santos, of
the Centro de Astronomia e Astrofisica da Universidade de Lisboa,
Portugal.

"Otherwise the planet would have become much more massive," Santos said
via
e-mail.

"This object is therefore likely to be a planet with a rocky core
surrounded by
a small gaseous envelope and would therefore qualify as a super-Earth,"
the
European team said in a statement.

The discovery was made with a European Southern Observatory telescope at
La
Silla, Chile. There are no conventional pictures of the object, as it
was
detected by noting it gravitational effect on the star. The search
project
leading to the discovery is led by Michel Mayor of the Geneva
Observatory in
Switzerland.

While researchers do not know the full range of conditions under which
life can
survive, the newly discovered world, with its hot surface, is not the
sort of
place biologists would expect to find life as we know it.

Santos said life on the world is not likely. But, he added, "one never
knows."