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Planet plundering

61virbsim2.jpg

A haul of planets around stars like the Sun has been announced. A planet 7.4 times the mass of the Earth was found around the nearby bright star HD1461, after 12.8 years of observations with a spectrometer on the Keck telescope, Hawaii. Two larger planets are probably orbiting the same star.

The planets were discovered by a team led by Steven Vogt from the University of California, Santa Cruz. They also found a planet 5.1 Earth masses around another nearby star, 61 Virginis, and two other planets similar in size to Neptune. Those planets were found after 4.6 years of searching with the Keck and Anglo-Australian telescopes.

Two papers reporting these discoveries have been accepted for publication at the Astrophysical Journal (papers here and here, thanks to Greg Laughlin’s blog Systemic – Laughlin also from UCSC is co-author of the papers).

The planets were discovered using the radial velocity technique, which watches a star’s wobble as it’s influenced by a planet’s pull. This can give a lower estimate on the mass of that planet.

Inevitably talk turns to finding a habitable planet like Earth in another solar system. “These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,” says Vogt in a press release.

Image: 61 Vir b (simulation by J. Langton, Principia College)

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