Smallest planet yet found outside our solar system - Polidicks

[IMG]http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/topstories/2013/02/20/li-620-kepler-37-planet-lineup.jpg[/IMG] [QUOTE]A hot, rocky planet discovered using the Kepler space telescope is the smallest ever found outside our solar system. The new planet, called Kepler-37b, has a radius less than a third the size of Earth’s, making it roughly the size of the moon, a paper published online in the journal Nature reported Wednesday. "The thing that really I find astounding about this is we’ve managed to find a planet that is smaller than any that we know of in our own inner solar system,” Thomas Barclay, a researcher at NASA-Ames Research Center, who led the study, said in an interview with CBC News. Barclay noted that many of the first planets found outside our solar system were larger than the planets found in our own solar system, showing that stellar systems could be quite different from our own. "Now we know that things are not only larger than what we have in our own solar system, but also smaller,” he said. Kepler-37b is “significantly smaller” than Mercury, which has officially been the smallest planet in our solar system since Pluto was demoted to a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union in 2006. Kepler-37b is the inner-most of three planets detected orbiting a star called Kepler-37, located about 210 light years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The star is sun-like, but cooler and a little bit smaller than the sun, according to the paper. Kepler-37b is thought to be rocky, with no atmosphere, like Mercury. Because it is very close to its star, its surface temperature is estimated to be a scorching 400 C. The little planet is also a speedy traveller, completing its journey around its star once every 13 days. The two other planets in the system are Kepler-37c, which has a radius about 70 per cent the size of Earth’s, and Kepler-37d, which has a radius about double that of the Earth’s. The Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, is pointed at stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra located between a few hundred and a few thousand light years away, within our own Milky Way galaxy. The telescope detects planets by measuring the brightness of stars over time and detecting dips in the brightness caused by planets passing in front of the star during the course of their orbits. The smaller the planet relative to the size of the star, the smaller the change in brightness and the more difficult the planet is to detect — even though smaller planets are expected to be more common than larger planets. [/QUOTE] [url]http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/02/20/science-smallest-planet-discovered-kepler-37b.html[/url] They found big planets in the habitable zone.....

The fact that we can detect a relative speck of dust so far away will never cease to astound me. Can't wait for what else that satellite finds.

Can't wait till we can somehow take low-res images of these planets.

[QUOTE=nickohlus;39664752]The fact that we can detect a relative speck of dust so far away will never cease to astound me. Can't wait for what else that satellite finds.[/QUOTE] oh I can't wait for when Web comes out in 2018 :D

And yet Pluto still isn't a fuckin' planet anymore.

If we can detect planets that small, it greatly increases our chance of finding planets capable of supporting life.

[QUOTE=DeVotchKa;39664900]And yet Pluto still isn't a fuckin' planet anymore.[/QUOTE] Isn't that more to do with the fact it failed to clear it's orbital path, and not because of it's size?

[QUOTE=Canuhearme?;39664966]Isn't that more to do with the fact it failed to clear it's orbital path, and not because of it's size?[/QUOTE] I also think it was because another rock larger than Pluto was found, called Eris. And there could still be rocks even larger that Eris out there, Then we would have 10+ planets, When they are tiny compared to the other 8 planets.

[QUOTE=DeVotchKa;39664900]And yet Pluto still isn't a fuckin' planet anymore.[/QUOTE] Unless you want to call every asteroid a planet, then no, it's not a planet.

[QUOTE=King Tiger;39665229]Unless you want to call every asteroid a planet, then no, it's not a planet.[/QUOTE] Its a dwarf planet.

[QUOTE=theevilldeadII;39664765]oh I can't wait for when Web comes out in 2018 :D[/QUOTE] JWST isn't for planetary viewing.

[QUOTE=DeVotchKa;39664900]And yet Pluto still isn't a fuckin' planet anymore.[/QUOTE] Pluto will always be one in my eyes ;~;7

[QUOTE='[Slendy v2.0];39665771']Pluto will always be one in my eyes ;~;7[/QUOTE] Who cares what it's called? Nothing about the rock has changed.