© 2011 Anne-Muriel Brouet
© 2011 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Maxi Quiz n°8 The questions | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 57 — Winter 2011 | The Seven Fundamental Realities (what is given) |
Genevans discover 50 new exoplanets! The harvest includes sixteen super-Earths! It’s not a handful but a shovelful!
In front of the cream of extrasolar planet hunters gathered in Wyoming (United States), the HARPS spectrograph team, led by the famous Geneva astrophysicist Michel Mayor, announces the discovery of around fifty new specimens. The harvest - unprecedented in the history of exoplanets started in 1995 by the aforementioned and his colleague Didier Queloz, from the University of Geneva - is all the richer because it contains 16 super-Earths. In other words, planets of small mass, most probably telluric. The 50 new exoplanets are added to the already identified to date.
In the lot, the HARPS team — the instrument built eight years ago by UNIGE experts and installed at the European Southern Observatory in Chile — slipped HD 88512 b, a super-Earth which was the subject of a publication three weeks ago in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. With a mass of 3.6 times that of the Earth, 35 light years from us, it is located at the edge of the habitable zone, that is to say at such a distance from its star that the temperature allows the presence of liquid water. It is the second super-Earth discovered by HARPS, but above all the one which has the smallest mass ever measured with the radial velocity system.
“This important harvest allows us to study the statistics of exoplanets, specifies Françesco Pepe, astrophysicist at UNIGE. We thus realize that there are many super-Earths or Neptunes.” Thus more than 50% of stars similar to the Sun have at least one planet with a mass lower than that of Saturn. And yet, astrophysicists are far from “seeing” everything!
Anne-Muriel Brouet
| Maxi Quiz n°8 The questions | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 57 — Winter 2011 | The Seven Fundamental Realities (what is given) |