Cool Super Earth Facts.

Possible first earth-like plan­et "super- Earth" found out­side our So­lar Sys­tem<< 1 2 3 4 >>

Topic started on 24-4-2007 @ 05:28 PM by rai76

In a find­ing that if con­firmed could stand as a land­mark in history, as­tro­no­mers have re­ported dis­co­v­er­ing the most Earth-like plan­et out­side our So­lar Sys­tem to date: a world that may have liq­uid oceans and thus life. Swiss, French and Por­tu­guese sci­en­tists found the body, es­ti­mated as 50 per­cent wid­er than our Earth, or­bit­ing a so-called red dwarf star rel­a­tively close to Earth. The star is thought to har­bor two oth­er plan­ets al­so. Artist's con­cept of a red dwarf, a dim star that burns slow­ly and very long. (Cour­te­sy NASA) The new­found exo­pla­n­et—as as­tro­no­mers call plan­ets around stars oth­er than the Sun—would be the small­est such body ev­er re­ported. None­the­less, the object is es­ti­mat­ed to weigh as much as five Earths, part­ly thanks to its great­er width. For the same rea­son, it would have more than twice Earth’s sur­face ar­ea. His­tor­i­cally, only large exo­pla­n­ets lend them­selves to hu­man de­tect­ion, though that is chang­ing.

All information found on http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread279493/pg1