New Earthlike Planets Discovered!

On Monday European scientist announced the discovery of three Super Earth type planets. Located some 42-lightyears from Earth, in the constellations Doradus and Pictor, these worlds orbit a sun that is less massive than our own. "Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many," commented Michel Mayor from Switzerland's Geneva Observatory. "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it," Mayor stated. Each of the three planets, one larger in scale than the next is estimated to be 4.2 times larger than Earth, the other two are 6.7, and 9.4 times as massive. Each planet also orbits its star at different speeds. One planet takes only four days to complete one orbit as opposed to Earth taking 365 days! The second planet takes only three days, and the third twenty days. Mayor and his fellow scientist use what's called a High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS for short to locate planets. This telescope is located at the La Silla observatory in Chile. The HARPS telescope uses spectrographic measurements, in other words as a planet or planets orbit a star the mass of those worlds causes the star to wobble, and this movement is what the HARPS telescope measures. So far more than 270 worlds have been discovered using this method. The majority of these worlds are estimated to be the size of Jupiter or Saturn.