A team of French and Swiss astronomers working at the La Silla observatory in Chile discovered a planet about the size of Neptune located some 20.5 light years from &to=http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/16288_universe.html' target=_blank>our solar system, the European Southern Observatory said on Wednesday.
The still unnamed planet is located in the Libra constellation and has about 17 times the mass of the Earth. It takes only 5 days to complete its orbit around a star that has about a third the mass of the Earth's sun, the press release said.
The star G1 581 is a red dwarf, a small, cool, faint star that is the most common type in our &to=http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/12/02/40259.html' target=_blank>galaxy. Since 80 of the 100 stars closest to the sun are red dwarfs, astronomers are interested in discovering if they have planets orbiting them.
"Our discovery could mean that planets orbiting small stars are common," said Xavier Delfosse, a member of France's Grenoble Astrophysics Laboratory, said in a statement. "This tells us that red dwarfs are key in the search for exoplanets," referring to planets circling other stars.
Of the currently known 170 planets circling other stars, only five of them are smaller than this newly discovered planet, informs Reuters.
According to Space.com, the star is a red dwarf, a class of star about 50 times fainter than the Sun. Among the 100 stars closest to us, 80 are red dwarfs. But astronomers had so far found only two planets in searches of about 200 red dwarfs, while well more than a hundred planets have been found around other types of stars.
The star, catalogued as Gl 581, is located 20.5 light-years away in the Libra constellation. It is about one-third as massive as our Sun.
"Previous surveys may have missed many planets due to their insufficient precision," says Stйphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory and co-author of the work.
The planet was found using the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.
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