Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
It's SuperEarth!
European astronomers announced they had found a "super-Earth" orbiting a star some 50 light years away, a finding that could significantly boost the hunt for worlds beyond our Solar System. [...] The so-far unnamed world, which whizzes around mu Arae in just 9.5 days, is the smallest of the estimated 125 so-called extrasolar planets that have been detected so far.
"This new planet appears to be the smallest yet discovered around a star other than the Sun. This makes mu Arae a very exciting planetary system," French astronomer Francois Bouchy was quoted in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With few exceptions, the extrasolar planets spotted so far have approximated the size of Jupiter, the giant of the Solar System. But this latest find is far smaller, with a mass of only 14 times that of the Earth, which puts it in the same ballpark as Uranus for size.
Jake pointed me toward this story in the comments of the last post (thank you, sir). What makes the discovery exciting is that this is a rocky planet with an atmosphere instead of a gas giant like the other extrasolar planets found so far. Whether it lies in the system's sweet spot where water wouldn't boil away or freeze solid is the next big question. Nonetheless, you know that any article that namedrops Uranus is going to be good for a sophomoric chuckle, right? Right.
The big difference, though, is that Uranus is an uninhabitable hell, a gassy planet on the far frigid fringes...
Insert Beavis laugh here.
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Possible Super Earth discovered
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A European team of astronomers, working at La Silla Science Operations, has discovered the lightest known planet orbiting a star other than our sun (an "exoplanet").
The new exoplanet orbits the bright star mu Arae located in the southern constellation of the Altar. It is the second planet discovered around this star and completes a full revolution in 9.5 days.
With a mass of only 14 times the mass of the Earth, the new planet lies at the threshold of the largest possible rocky planets, making it a possible super Earth-like object. Uranus, the smallest of the giant planets of the Solar System has a similar mass. However Uranus and the new exoplanet differ so much by their distance from the host star that their formation and structure are likely to be very different.
This discovery was made possible by the unprecedented accuracy of the HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, which allows radial velocities to be measured with a precision better than 1 meter per second.