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下附全文，如果没有兴趣阅读英文，估计几天后中文新闻就出来了。大致：名称：CoRoT-Exo-7b 发现者：COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits)，法国引领的欧洲项目，2006年12月27日发射。位置：麒麟座，425光年主要特征：直径仅为地球2倍，为迄今最小纪录，而且超出了科研人员对该设备分辨率的预计。另外一个记录则是其公转周期仅为20小时（水星88天）。由于它距离其恒星如此之近，估计表面温度超过1000度。该行星上或者是布满了喷发的火山，或者是沸腾的海洋，总之，原文的用词是“地狱般的世界“。展望：距离发现大小，成份，温度与地球接近的行星的日子不远了。3月NASA将发射开普勒空间望远镜，借助于更大的视场和更高的灵敏度，更多系外类地行星可能被发现。外星人，我等着你哦！ Mercury, Schmercury. This Planet is Really Toasty By Phil Berardelli ScienceNOW Daily News 3 February 2009 Astronomers today reported the discovery of a planet beyond our solar system that's just twice the diameter of Earth. But this new neighbor is far from habitable: CoRoT-Exo-7b is either a hellish world of erupting volcanoes and sizzling temperatures, or it's covered by a scalding ocean. Either way, the discovery could pave the way toward finding more Earth-sized alien worlds, some of which may actually be habitable. To date, astronomers have discovered some 330 planets orbiting stars other than our sun. But almost none are rocky like Earth and its inner-solar-system neighbors. Most are gas giants, even bigger versions of Jupiter. The apparent scarcity of Earth-like worlds probably has nothing to do with their actual abundance. Rather, such small objects are difficult to distinguish against the blinding glare of their host stars. That's where CoRoT comes in. The European spacecraft, launched in 2006, can detect minute decreases in the light output of stars caused when planets pass in front of them. At a CoRoT symposium in Paris today, mission scientists reported the discovery of the smallest planet yet found orbiting a sunlike star. CoRoT-Exo-7b is about 425 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. The discovery is unexpected because the researchers weren't certain the spacecraft could resolve planets that are so small, says team leader Daniel Rouan of the Observatoire de Paris. What is surprising, and exciting, says planetary scientist Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, is the proximity to its star, so close that one orbit takes only about 20 hours. (Mercury's orbit takes 88 days.) "This is the record-holder," says Lissauer, who was not part of the discovery team. That proximity to the sun makes for less than ideal conditions on CoRoT-Exo-7b's surface, which the team estimates burns at more than 1000癈. But things may not have always been that way: Theoretical calculations suggest that CoRoT-Exo-7b may have been an icy world that formed far away from its parent star, says Lissauer. Then it migrated inward, finally settling into its extremely close and nearly perfect circular orbit. If so, he explains, the planet may contain substantial quantities of water, and perhaps hydrogen and helium. If there's a rocky surface, he says, it could lie "beneath thousands of kilometers of fluid." Confirmation will come with further observation. "We can find the density of the planet, which will tell us something about its composition," says team member Malcolm Fridlund of the European Space Agency. "We will study this object for years." Meanwhile, Lissauer says, the discovery bodes well for NASA's Kepler spacecraft, due to be launched in March. With its larger field of view and more sensitive instruments, it will have an even greater chance of spotting Earth-like alien worlds.

系外行星新发现，地球量级