"This is by far the most Earth-like planet ever found," said Dr. Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Marcy used one of the giant 10-meter diameter Keck telescopes in Hawaiii to discover a small extra-solar planet. (An extra-solar planet is a planet located beyond our solar system.) This new planet is about 7 times the mass of earth; even so, it's the smallest planet extra-solar planet we've found. It's probably made of rock, and this makes it different than any other extra-solar planet. All of the other 150-or-so extra-solar planets that have been identified are large spheres of gas, like our neighbor Jupiter. "This is a really cool result,"says Dr. David Spergel, a Princeton University scientist who is building a planet hunting satellite for NASA.
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