Keck I telescope helps Caltech astronomers spot a "super earth"

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other institutions, using the highly sensitive 10-meter Keck I telescope atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea, have detected an extrasolar planet with a mass just four times that of Earth.

Credit: L. Calcada, ESO

The planet, which orbits its parent star HD156668 about once every four days, is the second-smallest world among the more than 400 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system) that have been found to date. It is located approximately 80 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Hercules.

The find, made possible through NASA's Eta-Earth Survey for Low-Mass Planets was announced earlier this month at the 215th American Astronomical Society meeting held January 4-7, 2010, in Washington, D.C.

Dubbed HD 156668b, the planet-a so-called "super Earth" that would glow with blast-furnace-like temperatures-offers a tantalising hint of discoveries yet to come. Astronomers hope those discoveries will include Earth-size planets located in the "habitable zone," the area roughly the distance from the earth to the sun, and thus potentially favourable to life.

HD 156668b was discovered with the radial velocity or wobble method, which relies on Keck's High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) to spread light collected from the telescope into its component wavelengths or colours, producing a spectrum. As the planet orbits the star, it causes the star to move back and forth along our line of sight, which causes the starlight to become redder and then bluer in a periodic fashion.

The colour shifts give astronomers the mass of the planet and the characteristics of its orbit, such as how much time it takes to orbit the star. The majority of the exoplanets discovered have been found in this way.