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...looking for a world where life might thrive, a planet must be at the right temperature for water to exist in liquid form. So it needs to orbit its star in the so-called habitable zone, a "Goldilocks" location that allows a planet to be neither too hot nor too cold. In that respect, GJ 1214b is again a near miss. Its surface temperature hovers at a sweltering 190°C (374°F), which is well above the boiling point of water, at least in Earth's atmospheric pressure. Fortunately, GJ 1214b's atmosphere makes the pressure...
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the discovery of GJ 1214b is that the planet was found at all. Planet hunters usually focus their attention on Sun-like stars - that is, large and hot - on the assumption that if you're looking for life, you should look in a place that is as similar to our solar system as possible. Charbonneau, however, focused on about 2,000 small, dim, red stars known as M-dwarfs, nearby Earth. M-dwarfs are much more numerous than Sun-like stars; of the 300 stars closest to Earth, says Charbonneau...
Charbonneau's group isn't the only one looking. An international consortium of observatories just announced the discovery of several other super-Earths around Sun-like stars, though these new planets are far too hot to sustain life and too far away to be able to study. Separately, NASA's Kepler Mission will present the first results of its planet search at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington in January. "[The Kepler team] has already submitted 28 scientific papers based on 43 days of data or less," says MIT planet theorist Sara Seager. "It's going...
...those who came out of yesterday's Ec 10 final feeling not so hot, know this: the utility of an economics concentration is high...
...fetched. One example is the cabbage-soup diet, which promises that adherents will lose 10 lb. in a week by eating only cabbage soup. A more challenging competitor might be the lemonade diet, which requires dieters to subsist on a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup, red pepper and hot water for as long as 10 days. While it may not rely on sound science, Siegal's cookie diet looks that much more appealing by comparison...