Posthuman Blues

Super Earths Might Be Common

Nearly all the extrasolar planets discovered have been Jupiter-sized or larger. But astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics think that super-earths - rocky planets several times larger that our planet - might actually be much more common. Based on the recent discovery of a super-earth around a red dwarf star 9,000 light-years away, the research team calculated that there are probably 3 times as many of these planets than the larger gas giants.