‘Super-Earth’ spotted in distant sky European astronomers announced today they had found a `super-Earth' orbiting a star some 50 light years away, a finding that could significantly boost the hunt for worlds beyond our Solar System. The planet was spotted orbiting a Sun-like star, mu Arae, which is located in a southern constellation called the Altar and which is bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, they said. This new planet appears to be the smallest yet discovered around a star other than the Sun. This makes mu Arae a very exciting planetary system, French astro-nomer Francois Bouchy was quoted in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With few exceptions, the extrasolar planets spotted so far have approximated the size of Jupiter, the giant of the Solar System. But this latest find is far smaller, with a mass of only 14 times that of the Earth, which puts it in the same ballpark as Uranus for size. It has a gassy atmosphere, amounting to about a tenth of its mass, although what this consists of is so far unknown. The object qualifies "as a ‘super-Earth," the ESO said. Much about this enigmatic world remains to be uncovered, least of all whether it may be habitable. Agence France Presse Paris, August 25: ----------------------- UPDATE ----------------------- Discovery of planets new step in search for Earthlike bodies WASHINGTON Three new planets have been discovered in other solar systems and are the closest ever found to Earth in size, marking an important step in the search for planets that could support life elsewhere in the universe, scientists have announced. "The ingredients of life are abundant in the universe," said Geoffrey Marcy, a planet -hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped make the new discoveries. Referring to rocky planets as "petri dishes" where the ingredients of life could come together, Marcy added: "In the next five-10-20 years, maybe we will learn if there are microbes, furry creatures, even intelligent life on other planets." An international group led by Barbara McArthur, an astronomer at the University of Texas, discovered a planet only 14 times more massive than Earth orbiting a sunlike star nearly 44 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. (Jupiter, by contrast, is roughly 318 times more massive than Earth.) The new planet orbits so close to its parent star that its "year" - a complete orbit around its star - lasts 2.8 Earth days. The discovery brings to four the number of planets orbiting the star, known as 55 Cancri. A second group, led by Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., discovered a planet around a dwarf star called Gliese 436, which lies 33.4 light-years from Earth. This planet is at least 21 times more massive than Earth, and has a year that lasts only 2.6 Earth days. By finding smaller planets, scientists say, there is at least a chance that they are rocky planets, as opposed to gas giants. "We're on the way to finding our first extrasolar Earth," McArthur said, "and that's an exciting highway to be on." Wednesday, September 01, 2004 - Page updated at 12:33 A.M. By The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor ------------------------------------------------- FURTHER REFERENCES GO - "search perceptions" - in SEARCH-ENGINE file-ID www.perceptions.couk.com/newone.txt