A planet fourteen times the size of the Earth may not be all that small, but it's tiny compared to the bulk of planets discovered around other stars, most of which are so-called 'hot Jupiters' -- gas giants in tight orbits around their parent star. The European Southern Observatory's La Silla telescope has now found a much smaller planet, and one that may well be rocky, a kind of 'super Earth,' as some researchers have said. But the new planet orbits the star mu Arae (about fifty light years from Earth) so tightly that it completes its orbit in less than ten days, making for temperatures that probably top 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. You can read more about the mu Arae planet at Space.com, whose story quotes Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution in Washington as saying, "It's much closer to our solar system than anything we've found so far...I'm still somewhat stunned that they have such good data." The star mu Arae is similar in size and brightness to the Sun, and the new planet seems...

Over 135 planets have now been discovered by studying their effects on the star they orbit, which produce a pronounced wobble. But so far, only a few have been found by using the transit method, detecting the periodic dimming of a star as a planet passes between it and the Earth. Now a planet called TrES-1 has been located by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES), which uses small, inexpensive telescopes to find planets around bright stars. You can read about the TrES discovery through this press release from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Obviously, finding planets through the transit method means locating those stars whose orbital plane is lined up properly for the Earth-bound observer to see the crossing (and you have to be careful to eliminate eclipsing binaries). But rare as these may be, the beauty of discovering such planets is that we can now make some direct observations of planetary atmospheres, and we'll get a good reading on the mass and size of...