BA Blog: Welcome our tiny family
Quote:
News flash! The lowest mass planet yet found just so happens to orbit a very low mass star — so low mass, in fact, that it might not even really be a star.
OK, first, the planet. Called MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb — of course! — it has a mass of about three times the Earth, making it the lowest mass planet found so far. It orbits its parent star at about the same distance Venus orbits the Sun. However, that doesn’t make the planet terribly hot: the host star is itself may be a brown dwarf, in which case the planet may be as cold as Pluto! [...]
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(Edit: 3000 lightyears. Microlensing. By, I think I heard, EPOXI (Deep Impact's new gig).) (Edit, later: not EPOXI!)
(Edit:
BBC: Tiniest extrasolar planet found)
And, I saw it live because the BA and Pamela Gay are doing Ustream 'casts of the press conferences from the AAS. See topic
AAS meetings on your computer . And get on over to Ustream
live AAS press conferences (contents will vary over time).