BRIEF: Harvard Researchers Discover 'Super-Earth'

Harvard researchers have discovered a "super-Earth" orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth with telescopes no larger than those used by amateur stargazers.

The team believes that the planet—named GJ1214b after the red dwarf star it orbits and 6.5 times the Earth's size—is primarily composed of water and ice but, at roughly 400 degrees Fahrenheit, is too hot to sustain life.

Harvard astronomy professor David Charbonneau and his colleagues discovered the super-Earth using the MEarth (pronounced "mirth") Project, an array of eight robotic telescopes that have monitored 2,000 red dwarf stars since Oct. 2008.

The discovery, published in the British journal Nature last week, shows that ground-based technologies are capable of finding such planets.

According to Charbonneau, the eight telescopes surveyed red dwarf stars looking for periodic faintness, a signal that a planet has crossed in front of its star, blocking out a small portion of the star's light.

GJ1214b was discovered when the team detected a one percent faintness when the super-Earth eclipsed its host star during its orbit.

“It was completely unexpected to find something in the first six months,” Charbonneau said. “We expected to find a planet maybe three years out, so this was really exciting.”

Charbonneau added that MEarth is the first project dedicated to looking at red dwarf stars, stating that most researchers study other stars like the sun.

Zachory K. Berta, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who first spotted the hint of the planet among the data, said that the telescopes used in the project are "no more advanced than what a sophisticated amateur would have."

But to characterize the planet's atmosphere, Charbonneau said that he will need a space-based instrument like NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

—Staff writer Tara W. Merrigan can be reached at tmerrigan@college.harvard.edu.