Gliese 581 c

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Gliese 581c

On April 5 , 2007 , a team of astronomers in a European observatory in Chile discovered another planet found outside our solar system . This accomplishment was made through the use of a High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher (HARPS ) installed in a 3 .6 meter telescope (NASA . The smallest extrasolar planet known to date , it was dubbed Gliese 581c after Gliese 581 - the name of the star it orbits

Belonging to the constellation Libra , the planet is 20 .5 light years

br away or 190 trillion kilometers from Earth . Still , its parent star belongs to the 100 nearest stars to our sun . Studying the planet up close using current space technology and within a man 's lifetime is still a remote possibility . This is because at the speed of light , it would take two decades of interstellar travel to reach it , about one decade to explore it and another two decades for the return trip

Gliese 581c 's diameter is 1 .5 times bigger than our Earth and is 5 times more massive (The Economist . It completes a full 10 .9 million kilometer orbit in a span of 13 days compared to our planet which accomplishes this in 365 days (Layton . This means that a year on Gliese 581c is equal to just about a week on Earth . It travels round in between two other planets - Gliese 581d which is farther away and Gliese 581b which is nearer to their parent star (BBC News...