Word: planetsized
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The new approach to locating planets, called the transit technique, depends upon observing changes in the level of brightness of light that distant stars emit.
Dr. Guillermo Torres, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Center who worked on the OGLE, or Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, said the method was less complicated than previous attempts to find planets.
“Many stars can masquerade as planets,” he said. When a star interferes with another star’s light emission, the dimming effect is much greater than that of a planet.
After detecting about 60 light-dimming bodies as potential planet candidates, the researchers used a series of telescopes to provide clues about which interfering bodies were too large to be planets.
While rains of hot iron plummet to the surface of OGLE-TR-56b, which is roughly the size of Jupiter, astronomers hope that this new, more direct technique can now be used to find earth-sized planets with raindrops of water.