已发现四颗地球大小行星.docVIP

天文学家又利用kepler发现两颗直径小于地球的行星。这两颗行星围绕红巨星运行。很可能是类木行星被红巨星蒸发，遗留下的致密核心形成的。 Astrophysicists have discovered two tiny, record-breaking planets that survived millions of years plowing through the broiling interior of a giant star. Outside our solar system, these are the smallest planets ever found, they are the least massive, said University of Montreal astrophysicist Gilles Fontaine, who co-authored the study with an international team led by four of his former Ph.D students. The planets KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02 have radii about 0.76 and 0.87 times that of the Earth, the researchers reported online in the journal Nature Wednesday. That makes them slightly smaller than two planets billed by NASA earlier this week as the smallest ever found. The two planets circle a type of star known as a sub-dwarf that is much hotter than our sun and located 3,900 light years away from Earth, near the constellations Lyra and Cygnus. They are the hottest planets by a long shot because they are so close to their star, Fontaine said. The distance between the planets and their star is just 0.60 per cent and 0.76 per cent of the distance between the Earth and the sun. They have the shortest ever orbital period found for a planet, Fontaine added, noting that a year lasts just 5.8 hours for one of the planet and 8.2 hours for the other, shattering the previous known planetary record of 16 hours. Because they are so close to their star, they are tidally locked so that the same side always faces toward the star and the other side always faces away. Iron rain Naturally, the temperature on the star-facing side is extremely hot — around 8000 to 9000 C. Thats hot enough to vapourize the iron that, along with nickel, make up most of the materials in the planets. In all likelihood, it forms clouds, drifts to the other side of planet, and rains back down in molten iron particles, Fontaine said. Keplers planet-hunting method NASAs Kepler telescope was designed to find planets outside our solar system by