Scientists announce planet bounty

Astronomers have announced a haul of planets found beyond our Solar System. The 32 "exoplanets" ranged in size from five times the mass of Earth to 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers said. They were found using a very sensitive instrument on a 3.6m telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile. The discovery is exciting because it suggests that low-mass planets could be numerous in our galaxy.

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Link to BBC Article

[edit on 19/10/2009 by booda]

[edit on 19/10/2009 by booda]

The Planet Genus or Genus I sounds like a nice name for a planet, a nice ring to it and kinda rolls off the tongue. Unlikely, but I can still hope.

maybe if you spot one you could get one renamed.....just buy yourself an nice telescope/observatory like the the one they have in Chile....plus you'll need to be somewhere quite remote and purchase a couple of acres of land to put the observatory on....might be some videos on youtube on how to make one....

but it does have a nice ring to the name Genus......

Somehow I don't think I could build one as big as the one in Chile. If I could get one though i'd watch the moon.

Originally posted by Genus
Somehow I don't think I could build one as big as the one in Chile. If I could get one though i'd watch the moon.

Being "blown" up by nasa?

The really cool thing is that the method used to find these 'near-earth' size planets is still only finding planets as 'small' as five times or so as big as Earth. There might be tons more even smaller that we just haven't seen yet due to technological limitations. For example, if there was a copy of our solar system somewhere out there, we'd think that solar system had 4 planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, because we wouldn't be able to see the rest, as they are too small. That's missing half the planets in our system, so who knows what's still out there?

getting closer to earth sized planets from ground observations. Although only around M class stars its still amazing.

in 1000 days we will know how common earth sized planets are in earth like orbits around G type stars. Exciting times i say scrap the moon missions and go all out for exoplanets.

Roll on SIM lite planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov...

[edit on 19-10-2009 by yeti101]