New 'Gas Dwarf' Class of Alien Planets Revealed

NBC ^ | Nola Taylor Redd, SPACE.com

[BenLurkin]

These gas-dwarf alien planets have thick atmospheres like their larger gas-giant cousins but never quite made it to the size of the planetary behemoths found in the Earth's the outer solar system, researchers said.

The team studied more than 600 planets discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope and compared their sizes to the amount of elements other than hydrogen and helium contained in their star — a characteristic known as metallicity.

"We were particularly interested in probing the planetary regime smaller than four times the size of Earth, because it includes three-fourths of the planets found by Kepler," lead author Lars A. Buchhave, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. He presented the findings today (June 2) here at the 224th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston. [7 Great Exoplanet Discoveries by NASA's Kepler]

"That's where you'll find rocky worlds, which are the only kinds that we would consider potentially habitable," Buchhave said.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin.

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[SunkenCiv]

I went to school with some gassy dwarfs...

[GeronL]

:)