mobi 2011-01-11 13:23:59

A NASA spacecraft has detected a rocky planet that is the smallest ever discovered outside the Sun's solar system, the agency announced Monday.
The exoplanet -- so named because it orbits a star other than the Sun -- has been dubbed Kepler-10b. It measures 1.4 times the Earth's diameter and was confirmed after more than eight months of data collection, the agency said. It is the first rocky, or Earth-like, planet discovered by Kepler.
"All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun," said Natalie Batalha, deputy science team leader for the NASA mission. "The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off."
Kepler-10b's size and rocky composition would make it more likely than gaseous planets to contain liquid water, and perhaps life of some kind, if it were the right distance from its star, NASA said.