Here’s a spooky story, a planet around a nearby star much like our own Sun has been discovered. This planet’s radius is 2.7 times bigger than Earth, and the planet’s mass is 6.6 times that of the Earth.

The excitement about GJ 1214b (gotta love those planet names), which was discovered by a team led by David Charbonneau at Harvard University and is reported in Nature, is two-fold. First, the planet was detected by watching it transiting, or passing in front of its star – a technique that holds great promise for exoplanet hunters. Second, the planet is being called a ‘waterworld’, which means that Charbonneau’s team reckon, after working out the density of the planet, that it could be composed of water enshrouded in a hydrogen and helium layer.

The solar system is close enough to us, about 13 parsecs away, that its atmosphere can in future be probed from the ground.

Charbonneau is quick to point out, to Time magazine, that GJ1214b doesn’t look like it would harbour life: “What you want [for life] is a nice toasty ocean with a little bit of atmosphere. That’s not going to happen here," says Charbonneau. “I think it would be foolish to say categorically that [GJ 1214b] doesn’t have life. But we have no basis for thinking it could.”

The Dallas Morning News goes on to explain why: The planet is “hot as blazes”.

This is all jolly exciting for exoplanet scientists, and for those keen exoplanet readers out there you might have spotted that some other planets were discovered this week that seem to be even smaller than this one. You would be right – earlier this week 6 new planets were unveiled.. including two other ‘super-Earths’ These were detected using the more common exoplanet detection method, radial velocity, which can only put a lower limit on what the mass of the planet is likely to be.

A few years ago these discoveries on their own would be huge news. Now they’re coming in so thick and fast that soon the only thing likely to whet our insatiable appetite for news will be when we can see an exact replica of Earth – a planet the same size and mass around another star the same size and mass of our Sun. And after that? Well, the little green man, of course.

Image: An artist’s impression of the GJ1214 system, David A. Aguilar, CfA