* Astronomy

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth. They found the distant planet with a small fleet of ground-based telescopes no larger than those many amateur astronomers have in their backyards. Although the super-Earth is too hot to sustain life, the discovery shows that current, ground-based technologies are capable of finding almost-Earth-sized planets in warm, life-friendly orbits.
The discovery is being published in the December 17 issue of the journal Nature.

A super-Earth is defined as a planet between one and ten times the mass of the Earth. The newfound world, GJ1214b, is about 6.5 times as massive as the Earth. Its host star, GJ1214, is a small, red type M star about one-fifth the size of the Sun. It has a surface temperature of only about 4,900 degrees F and a luminosity only three-thousandths as bright as the Sun.

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Position(2000): RA 17 15 18.94 , Dec +04 57 49.7

Magnitude:  14.67 (V)

A newly discovered planet orbiting a small, nearby star appears to be a "water world," with a surface that might be covered with liquid water.

"This is certainly the first planet around another star which we think is mostly made of water" - David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who led the research team that found the new planet, named GJ 1214b.

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