rocky planet

“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public.” -Giuseppe Piazzi So it begins again: the neverending debate about who gets to be a planet and who doesn't. Everyone can bring their own interpretation of the science to the table -- and everyone has their own preferred naming scheme -- but when I think about the Solar System, I try to…
Kepler 10-b, announced at the Annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society today, has a mass of 4.6 Earth masses and a radius of 1.4 Earth radii. Density of 8.8 Kepler 10b: Exoplanet Catalog Kepler Mission website - 700 more to go. Kepler 10b - Mission catalog data 20 hour orbital period around an old, slightly metal poor ( Z ~ -0.15) G dwarf. 500 light years away. Kepler 10b - artist's conception Paper is Batalha et al (ApJ in press) - expect it will be on arXiv tonight. Lightcurve ought to be interesting, will really tell us how deep Kepler is going to go. 11th magnitude host star,…