Astonomers find tiny planet orbiting tiny star

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http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=25565

Astonomers find tiny planet orbiting tiny star

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, June 2, 2008
Source: University of Notre Dame - Comments

An international team of astronomers led by David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame has discovered an extra-solar planet of about three Earth masses orbiting a star with a mass so low that its core may not be large enough to maintain nuclear reactions. The result was presented Monday (June 2) at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting in St. Louis.

The planet, referred to as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, establishes a record for the lowest mass planet to orbit a normal star. The star, MOA-2007-BLG-192L, is at a distance of 3,000 light years and the lowest mass host star to have a companion with a planetary mass ratio. The mass of the host is about 6 percent of the mass of the sun. Such a star is called a brown dwarf, because this is slightly below the mass needed to sustain nuclear reactions in the core. But the measurement uncertainty also permits a host mass slightly above 8 percent of a solar mass, which would make MOA-2007-BLG-192L a very low-mass hydrogen burning star.

"Our discovery indicates that even the lowest mass stars can host planets," Bennett said. "No planets have previously been found to orbit stars with masses less than about 20 percent of that of the sun, but this finding suggests that we should expect very low-mass stars near the sun to have planets with a mass similar to that of the Earth. This is of particular interest because it may be possible use NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope to search for signs of life on Earth-mass planets orbiting low-mass stars in the vicinity of the sun."

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"The new MOA telescope-camera system allows us to monitor virtually all of the known microlensing events for planetary signals," Bennett said. "We would not have made this discovery without it."

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