A tiny planet found last year might be even smaller than first thought, weighing just 1.4 times as much as Earth. It is thought to orbit a dim red dwarf star (Illustration: ESO)
A tiny planet found last year might be even smaller than first thought, weighing just 1.4 times as much as Earth. It is thought to orbit a dim red dwarf star (Illustration: ESO)
Smallest planet weighs just three EarthsAstronomers have discovered a planet about as massive as three Earths, orbiting an object smaller than our Sun.
by Michael Brooks
2 June 2008
Even smaller exoplanets have been found previously around stellar corpses called neutron stars. But this is the lightest planet ever found orbiting a star in the prime of its life.
In fact, the host star itself is very lightweight, and is thought to be a brown dwarf weighing between 6 and 8% as much as the Sun. Brown dwarfs are more massive than planets but not massive enough to sustain nuclear reactions in their cores, as normal stars do.
"Our discovery indicates that even the lowest-mass stars can host planets," David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame, who led an international team of astronomers to the discovery, said on Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St Louis, Missouri, US.
The chilly planet orbits its brown dwarf parent in this artist's conception (Illustration: Exoplanet Exploration Program/NASA)
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I claim it in the name of conservatives.
At 1.4 earth masses, it will have a diameter about 10% greater than Earth and surface gravity about 16% greater.
/mark
Well, no technological life there.
