Small Like Us
Planets found outside of our solar system tend to be mammoth orbs more than 15 times as large as Jupiter. It’s not that rocky little worlds like ours don’t exist. It’s just that we have a tough time spotting them because of the glare of nearby stars. Now astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have managed to find a planet some 15 million light-years away that is just seven times as large as Earth, making it the smallest extrasolar planet ever discovered.