Number of out-of-this-world planets shoots past 400

William Atkins
Monday, 19 October 2009 18:22

Science - Space

European astronomers have announced that 32 exoplanets have just been discovered using instruments at the European Southern Observatory, taking the number of planets orbiting around stars other than the Sun to over 400.


The newly discovered exosolar planets, or exoplanets, were found with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph on the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory (La Silla, Chile).

All of the exoplanets were found to be located within our own Milky Way galaxy. Such a discovery is important to the study of exoplanets because it indicates that these “low-mass” planets—those with masses similar to the mass of Earth—could be quite numerous in our galaxy.

The 32 exoplanets range in mass from six to twenty times the mass of Earth.

One of the newly discovered exoplanets was found orbiting about red dwarf star Gliese 667 C, whose location is about 22 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Gliese 667 C is one of three stars in a triple star system, the other ones being Gliese 667 A and Gliese 667 B.

According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) article “32 New Exoplanets Found,” the HARPS spectrograph has now discovered 75 of the 402 exoplanets known by astronomers.

According to the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia (EPE), as of October 19, 2009, astronomers have now discovered 402 exoplanets.

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