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Smallest Exoplanets Found--Each Tinier Than Earth
from National Geographic News
Three new planets found outside our solar system are the smallest exoplanets yet discovered--each of them tinier than Earth, astronomers announced today. The tiny worlds are clustered around a red M-dwarf star called KOI-961 that is itself among the more diminutive stellar objects in the universe. The star is just a sixth as wide as our sun, or about 70 percent bigger than Jupiter.
"It's almost like you took your shrink gun and set it to seven and zapped the planetary system--the whole thing shrunk," said study co-author John Johnson, a researcher with NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology.
All three of the KOI-961 planets are thought to be rocky, like Earth and Mars. But they circle fairly close to their star, taking roughly two days to complete their orbits. That means, even though the host star is dimmer than our sun, the planets are far too hot for liquid water--and thus life as we know it--to exist on their surfaces.
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