Smallest Exoplanet Is Most Earth-like Yet. ![]() Aack, No Brakes! Giant New Exoplanet Goes the Wrong Way.The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance. Image: Artist's impression of Gliese 667C, a six Earth-mass exoplanet that circulates around its low-mass host star at a distance only 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. "By targeting M dwarfs and harnessing the precision of HARPS, we have been able to search for exoplanets in the mass and temperature regime of super-Earths," co-author Xavier Bonfils of the Joseph Fourier University in France said in a press release, "some even close to or inside the habitable zone around the star." The HARPS scientists focused their exoplanet-hunting efforts on certain kinds of stars, including stars similar to our sun and those with low mass (called Mdwarfs) or low metal content. The high-precision spectrograph can pick up even tiny fluctuations in a star's radial velocity - differences in speed of as little as 2.2 miles per hour - which are caused by the gravitational pull of a nearby planet. The HARPS instrument detects hidden exoplanets by looking for stellar "wobble," or a slight change in the radial velocity of potential host stars. Udry's announcement of the HARPS team's findings Monday at an exoplanet conference in Portugal marks the end of the first phase of HARPS research, and scientists say the project has been even more successful than they originally expected.
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