Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Far and near

The BBC reports two astronomical findings today,  one is a planet with four suns and 5,000 light-years away, the other a planet only four light years away.

The far planet was discovered by volunteers from the Planethunters.org, which in less than two years has garnered more than 170,000 members.  The organization aims to harness human pattern recognition to identify transits in publicly available data gathered by Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope.  The planet is more than six times the radius of the Earth.

The near planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's La Silla facility in Chile.  This planet is not in our solar system.  It has has at minimum the same mass as Earth, but circles its star far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.

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