ESO -Lightest exoplanet yet discovered

Interesting enough for a post, anyone here following what ESO does ? Oh wait i should have posted it with the title - "Extra - European NASA finds alien world!".

21 April 2009
For Immediate Release
“The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the ‘habitable zone’ — a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet’s surface”, says Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory, who led the European team to this stunning breakthrough.

Full press release here.




[edit on 2009/4/21 by reugen]

Originally posted by reugen
Interesting enough for a post, anyone here following what ESO does ? Oh wait i should have posted it with the title - "Extra - European NASA finds alien world!".

21 April 2009
For Immediate Release
“The holy grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the ‘habitable zone’ — a region around the host star with the right conditions for water to be liquid on a planet’s surface”, says Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory, who led the European team to this stunning breakthrough.

Full press release here.




[edit on 2009/4/21 by reugen]

ESO stand for: European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, thanks for the post!

Your welcome, thanks for the explanation of the ESO acronym. I've been following the ESO and JAXA (japan) for some time, they also make interesting discoveries. I know NASA Kepler is the great thing right now but check out the VLTs at Paranal, they are beautiful on their own. I've been wanting to make that trip to Chile sometime just to check them out.



www.eso.org...

Cheers.

This is an awesome find and I hope that we soon have scientific data on the possibilities for water on this exoplanet, imagine the implications if this exoplanet is even merely similar to earth.Here is the article that I read this morning.
www.universetoday.com...
Not to mention at only 20lys away we shouldn't have to much of a problem checking it out.

After reading the article (thanks for posting btw) I noticed that all the planets in the star system are going much faster than our own. Does anyone know any explaination for this? I imagine either it's a younger system and the planets will eventually spiral out a bit from going so fast... kind of like a rotating yoyo picking up speed (bad example I know)... any thoughts?