Science Focus
original post »Ever since exoplanets were first discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have dreamed of finding an Earth-like planet amongst the stars. Better detection techniques have allowed us to find smaller and smaller exoplanets. But when we spot a planet beyond our Solar System, does “Earth-sized” really mean “Earth-like?” A new study presented at this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting shows that the smallest exoplanets are much more likely to be similar to Earth than we thought.
Astronomers, led by graduate student Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used the HARPS-North instrument to study Kepler-93b, an exoplanet 1.5 times the radius of the Earth.
The latest study shows that Kepler-93b, an exoplanet with a diameter of 1.5 times that of Earth, has a mass of 4.02 times that of Earth. The mass and volume give a density, from which we can infer that this little exoplanet has a composition very similar to Earth’s.
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