http://truthufo.blogspot.com/: iscover dozens of exoplanets including three

Thursday, 21 August 2008

iscover dozens of exoplanets including three

"super-Land"

Three exoplanets a little bigger than our star, "super-Land," have been detected around a star by a team of astrophysicists Swiss and french who revealed their discovery Monday at Nantes, France, at ' an international symposium.

The team of the Observatory of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has uncovered three exoplanets by 4.2, 6.7 and 9.4 times the mass of Earth, orbiting around the star HD 40307, located 42 light years from Earth. "It's very, very closely, it's almost our neighbour," said Michel Mayor, in Geneva astronomer and discoverer of the first exoplanet in 1995.

Astronomers have also announced that it had found two "super-land" around two other stars, including one of 7.5 times the mass of the Earth around HD 181433.

More than 270 exoplanets have already been identified around stars, but they were so far for most too large, the size of Saturn or Jupiter, to be comparable to the Earth.

The last "super-Land" were detected by the HARPS spectrograph, an instrument of art designed and built by the Observatory of UNIGE and installed on a telescope at La Silla in Chile. It has already identified a total of 45 planets under 30 times the mass of Earth, astronomers indicated Monday.

"We know now that perhaps almost all stars have planets around them, and what we announced this morning is a fact that there are many very small planets, that is ie planets than four times the mass of Earth, "said Michel Mayor.

"Around stars that are light, probably in a year or two years, you will find habitable planets, for his part assured Stephane Udry, another member of the team at the University of Geneva.