Fifty New Alien Worlds Revealed - September 12, 2011

!9# Fifty New Alien Worlds Revealed - September 12, 2011

HARPS www.eso.org "European astronomers have announced the discovery of more 50 new planets beyond our solar system, including 16 that are just a notch above our own planet in mass. They say their record-breaking findings suggest that more than half of the stars like our sun possess planets, and that many of those worlds are lighter than Saturn. The pick of the litter is a planet that's already attracted a big share of the spotlight: HD 85512 b, a world at least 3.6 times as massive as Earth that's located 36 light-years away in the constellation Vela. HD 85512 b is the only one of the 16 super-Earths on today's list that is located in its star system's habitable zone. That's the area around a star where scientists believe water could exist in liquid form, which would make a rocky planet potentially livable. HD 85512 b's status came to light a couple of weeks ago in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, but the team behind the discovery provided more details about that super-Earth and the dozens of other worlds in papers presented today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Wyoming. The findings came from the team behind the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, which is installed at the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) La Silla Observatory in Chile. "The detection of HD 85512 b is far from the limit of HARPS, and demonstrates the possibility of discovering other super-Earths in the habitable zones ...

Fifty New Alien Worlds Revealed - September 12, 2011

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