Palscience

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European astronomers said on Monday June 16th, 2008 in France, they discovered batch of three “super-Earths” orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well.

“Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?” asked Michel Mayor of Switzerland’s Geneva Observatory. “We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it,” Mayor said in a statement.

According to the astronomers, the planets are bigger than Earth, one is 4.2 times the mass, one is 6.7 times and the third is 9.4 times. They have also observed the planets orbit the star in much rapid speed than earth. It takes one whizzing around just four days, compared with Earth’s 365 days, one taking 10 days and the slowest taking only 20 days.

With the advance technology researchers have these days, Mayor and his colleagues used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, a telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, to find the planets.

“With the advent of much more precise instruments such as the HARPS spectrograph … we can now discover smaller planets, with masses between 2 and 10 times the Earth’s mass,” said Stephane Udry, who also worked on the study.

The planets are 42 light-years away towards the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations. A light-year is the distance light can travel in one year at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, or about 6 trillion miles.

Scientists now are asking whether these planets have any sort of living things such as human, animals, or any thing else we might not know. They question will still open until we have the technology to reach the planets or observe them by  telescopes.