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A planet about 40 light years away and twice the size of Earth is made largely out of diamond, astronomers have said. The rocky planet, called 55 Cancri e, which is in the constellation of Cancer, is orbiting a sun-like star that is visible with the naked eye. Discovered by a US-Franco research team, the planet's radius is twice that of Earth's and its mass eight times greater. Temperatures on its surface reach 3,900°F (1,648°C). "The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite," said Nikku Madhusudhan, the Yale researcher whose findings...

Like most New Yorkers, I have real estate fever. Even though I hate moving, I can't travel anywhere without wondering what it would be like to live there. I can't walk down a street in Oaxaca or the East Village without window shopping for apartments and evaluating the restaurant scene and the availability of playgrounds. It doesn't stop there. Roll a sleeping bag out under the sky in a place like Mesa Verde, 7,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies, on a summer evening and you will wake up at midnight with your nose in the Milky Way. There are...

A new look at an alien planet that orbits extremely close to its parent star suggests that the rocky world might not be a scorching hot wasteland, as was thought. In fact, the planet may actually be stranger and wetter than astronomers ever imagined. The exotic planet 55 Cancri e is a relatively close alien planet, just 40 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). The super-dense world circles so close to its host star that it takes a mere 18 hours to complete one orbital lap. Using our solar system for comparison, 55 Cancri e is...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the crossing of a solid planet in front of a star located at only 42 light-years in the constellation Cancer. Thanks to this detection, astronomers know that this "super-Earth" measures 2.1 times the size of our Earth. This is the smallest exoplanet detected in the neighborhood of our Sun. The discovery is based on data acquired by the Spitzer spacecraft last January. The data allowed astronomers to detect the "transit" of the planet, i.e. the tiny decrease of the star's brightness occurring when the planet passes in front of it. "So far, the exquisite...

Among the most poignant sights in the heavens are white dwarfs. Although they have a mass comparable to our sun’s, they are among the dimmest of all stars and becoming ever dimmer; they do not follow the usual pattern relating stellar mass to brightness. Astronomers think white dwarfs must not be stars so much as the corpses of stars. Each white dwarf was once much like our sun and shone with the same brilliance. But then it began to run out of fuel and entered its stormy death throes, swelling to 100 times its previous size and brightening 10,000-fold, before...

My suggestion, which was not adopted, was that each planet be named for its stellar parent as usual, but then be designated by its orbital period in days, to one decimal point . The orbital periods may certainly be expected to be constrained to within a tenth of a day or so. No two planets could be confused (unless there are Trojan planets which share orbits but may be rare, and at any rate might have the additional unambiguous designations of i and ii, as needed.) Thus we would have Gliese 876-1.9, Gliese 876-30.9, and Gliese 876-60.1. Those with a...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets. The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday. Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight...

New Scientist for Dec 14, 2002, had a cover story for Planet X: The Hunt for Planet X by Heather Couperand Nigel HenbestJust over a year after the New Horizons' launch, it will... pick up enough velocity to reach Pluto, possibly as early as July 2015... In their new research, Melita and Brunini have explored three possible reasons for the Kuiper Cliff... The third possibility is that the region beyond was brushed clear by the gravity of Planet X... the KBO orbits they have investigated so far fit in best with the influence of a Planet X.

The tiny star, known as Oph1622, is so small that it never lit up, a failed star known as a brown dwarf. Even among brown dwarfs, it is small, with a mass equal to 14 Jupiters, or about a 75th that of the Sun... In a paper published this week on the Web site of the journal Science, astronomers at the University of Toronto and the European Southern Observatory report that a photograph of Oph1622 also shows a planet nearly as large as the star itself, with a mass equal to seven Jupiters.

Someday astronomers will likely create a long list of Sun-like stars with Earth-like planets around them. But technology has yet to reveal such worlds, instead allowing the detection only of much larger planets. Most of the roughly 200 known extrasolar planets are larger than Jupiter. Many complete their orbital years in just a few days. This proximity to their stars creates noticeable wobbles in the stars that make the planets detectable. But astronomers figure the giants probably formed farther out, in a disk of material swirling around a newborn star, and migrated inward. In doing so they would have destroyed...

Friday June 14, 3:19 AMSolar system similar to ours discovered: US astronomers US astronomers announced the discovery of a solar system similar to our own, at a press conference at NASA's headquarters here.Astronomers said they had identified an extra-solar planet orbiting this star at about the same distance Jupiter orbits the sun. They discovered a total of 15 extra-solar planets.University of California at Berkley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy discovered the star, named 55 Cancri, 15 years ago, jointly with his colleague at Washington's Carnegie Institution Paul Butler.In 1996, Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of a first planet orbiting 55...

Recent discoveries spark space race between Europeans and Americans to find another Earth The announcement by American astronomers last week that they had discovered the two smallest planets yet orbiting nearby stars, trumped a small planet discovery by European scientists five days earlier and capped the latest round in a frenzied hunt for other worlds like Earth. All three of these smaller planets belong to a new class of ''exoplanets'' - those that orbit stars other than our sun, the scientists said in a briefing last Tuesday. They define this new class by the planets' smaller mass - roughly 14...

American astronomers say they have discovered the two smallest planets yet orbiting nearby stars, trumping a small planet discovery by European scientists five days ago. All three of these smaller bodies belong to a new class of planets orbiting distant stars, the scientists said Tuesday. The planets are roughly the size of Neptune in our solar system and are 14 to 18 times the mass of Earth. The two new planets were spotted by two separate teams of U.S. researchers. Scientists not involved in the projects lauded both, saying their planets should be recognized as the first discoveries of planets...

Mu Arae is confirmed as only the second known extrasolar system with four planets (the other being 55 Cancri).