New planets found, including a baby

  • 03/04/2008

  • Times Of India (New Delhi)

Astronomers using robotic cameras said on Wednesday that they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had found the youngest planet yet. The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The robot team is called "Super-WASP', for Wide Area Search for Planets, and the cameras look for planets transiting, or crossing in front of, their stars. The light from the sun fades just slightly when this happens, and astronomers can extrapolate the size and location of the planet. Most planets around other stars have been found using a different method, measuring the tiny tugs that a planet makes on its sun's gravitational field. Don Pollaco of Queen's University in Belfast and colleagues used banks of cameras in Spain's Canary Islands, South Africa, Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, France and Australia to discover the 10 new extrasolar planets. The planets range in mass from half the size of Jupiter to more than eight times the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One orbits its sun once a day and is so close that its daytime temperature could reach about 2,300