Possible Earth-like planet discovered

WASHINGTON — A planet that may be Earth-like — but too hot for life as we know it — has been discovered orbiting a nearby star.

The discovery of the planet, with an estimated radius about twice that of Earth, was announced today at the National Science Foundation.

"This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets," Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington said in a statement. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin."

Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, added: "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."

Though the researchers have no direct proof that the new planet is rocky, its mass means it is not a giant gas planet like Jupiter, they said. They estimated the planet's mass as 5.9 to 7.5 times that of Earth.

It is orbiting a star called Gliese 876, 15 light years from Earth, with an orbit time of just 1.94 Earth days. They estimated the surface temperature on the new planet at between 400 degrees and 750 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gliese 876 is a small, red star with about one-third the mass of the sun. The researchers said this is the smallest star around which planets have been discovered. In addition to the newly found planet the star has two large gas planets around it.

Butler said the researchers think that the most probable composition of the planet is similar to inner planets of this solar system — a nickel/iron rock.

Gregory Laughlin of the Lick Observatory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said a planet of this mass could have enough gravity to hold onto an atmosphere. "It would still be considered a rocky planet, probably with an iron core and a silicon mantle. It could even have a dense steamy water layer."

Three other extrasolar planets believed to be of rocky composition have been reported, but they orbit a pulsar — the flashing corpse of an exploded star — rather than a normal type of star.

Old stuff, circa 2001:

Universal Earth
by Eugenie Samuel
The rocky material for Earth-like planets is orbiting billions of stars in our galactic neighbourhood, reveals a new stellar survey. It is the first strong evidence implying that planets like ours are commonplace in the Universe. So far, 53 planets have been identified orbiting other stars but all are gas giants at least the size of Jupiter and moving in unstable and highly eccentric orbits. Some astronomers have used these data to suggest that our solar system is unusual.
Astronomers glimpse atmosphere of extra-solar planet
by Jeff Hecht
To date astronomers have found 76 planets orbiting other suns, but they are too faint to see directly with today's telescopes and it has not been possible to detect their atmospheres. Tim Brown of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado has been studying one planet with an orbit that takes it directly between us and its star, HD 209458. Different gases absorb light at different wavelengths. So by looking at what happens to these particular wavelengths as the planet passes in front of the star, Brown and his colleague Dave Charbonneau, now at the California Institute of Technology, thought they might be able to glean information about the gases in its atmosphere.

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