Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Ed Yeates ReportingIn a report released Monday evening, a consortium of astronomers say they've discovered a "Super Earth" in a distant solar system 9,000 light years away.
This Earth, a long, long way from our own here, is much heavier, and at minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit, very, very COLD!
It's believed about 35 percent of all stars may have Super Earths, but now astronomers have actually found one 9,000 light years away. An artist's rendering shows a solid terrestrial planet twice as big as Earth, dominating its solar system.
Ohio State's Andrew Gould, who heads up the consortium of discovery astronomers, says, "We've never seen a system like this before, because we've never had the means to find them."
Seth Jarvis at Clark Planetarium tells us what it would be like to stand on the surface of this world.
Seth Jarvis, Director, Clark Planetarium: "Imagine that you are at the south pole and you've doubled your total weight, cause you're going to feel a lot heavier there, and it's three times colder."
Gould and his colleagues found Super Earth using a super sensitive technology called gravitational micolensing. It identifies two very distant stars that just happen to line up exactly, one in front of the other. Seth Jarvis says it's like probing large hives of bees a long, long distance away.
Seth Jarvis: "Being able to see something that only happens once when one bee gets in front of another bee in a swarm of bees over in the next county."
If this discovery is in fact a big icy minus 330 degree frozen Earth, it hints of that magic word again called water.
Seth Jarvis: "That means it's only a matter of time before you find an earth-sized planet at an earth like distance from a sun, where you find earth like temperatures."
And water and life? Perhaps! Astronomers say microlensing and new generation telescopes would have the ability to make those distant searches possible.
