The smallest planet yet spied outside our solar system has been found orbiting a sunlike star about 560 light-years away, astronomers announced today. Known as Kepler-10b, the planet is just 1.4 times Earth's size and 4.6 times its mass.
The planet, found using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, is the first of the more than 500 known exoplanets that's definitively rocky—much like Earth, Mars, Venus, or Mercury—the study team says. Launched in March 2009, Kepler was designed to hunt for potentially habitable Earthlike planets.
Astronomers have been studying Kepler-10b since its discovery in 2009, when the team detected a periodic dimming of the host star as the planet passed in front of the star.
NASA Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System
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