28 New Planets Discovered

May 30th, 2007

On Monday, the world’s largest and most prolific team of planet hunters announced Monday, May 28, the discovery of 28 new planets outside our solar system, increasing to 236 the total number of known exoplanets. My ink cartridges have pretty much run out lately while printing off a bunch of space pics, or more artist renditions really. As always there is an artist’s rendition of these new planets as they are nothing more than a tiny dot in most cases when photographed.

planet GJ436b

This is An artist’s concept of the Neptune-sized planet GJ436b (right) orbiting an M dwarf star, Gliese 436, at a distance of only 3 million miles.

The planets are among 37 new objects - each orbiting a star, but smaller than a star -discovered by the teams within the past year. Seven of the 37 are confirmed brown dwarfs, which are failed stars that nevertheless are much more massive than the largest, Jupiter-sized planets. Two others are borderline and could be either large, gas giant planets or small brown dwarfs.