The latest exoplanet to be discovered is the M-dwarf GJ 1214b, a watery planet barely 40 light years from earth. John Trimmer in Ars:
...the latest discovery comes from some pretty mundane hardware—a collection of 40cm telescopes—and has some very compelling properties: a super earth that’s likely to harbor liquid water, and orbits a star that’s close enough to allow current observatories to image its atmosphere.
How special is earth compared to a super earth far away?
Depending on how reflective the planet’s atmosphere is, it may have temperatures as high as 555K, or as low as 393K—the latter figure is only 20°C above the boiling point of water. That’s far and away the coolest planet we’ve yet spotted, and a far cry from the only other super earth we know much about, which is hot enough that its atmosphere probably contains vaporized titanium oxides.
Ouch.
Copyright © 2005 - 2010 Ron McElfresh, Honolulu, HI. All Rights Reserved.
McSolo is edited and published by Ron McElfresh, Honolulu, HI. Follow Ron on Twitter. Syndicated RSS Feed.
McSolo pages are best viewed in Safari 4.x or Firefox 3.x browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not supported.
McSolo is developed on a Mac. Powered by an Apple Xserve at ServerLogistics. Valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1.