Eleven New Planets Discovered

Astronomers announced this week that they’ve discovered eleven new planets in our universe.

International teams, working separately report they’ve discovered new planets in orbit around  stars 61 Virginis (with three confirmed), HD 1461 (one confirmed and two more likely) and 23 Lib (four confirmed) and HD 134987 (one more likely.)

The new planets were discovered using the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii.  Astronomers have detected more than 400 worlds orbiting nearby stars since 1995, according to the Paris Observatory’s Extra-solar Planet Catalog.

“These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,” said one team’s chief, Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a statement.

Next year, astronomers hope to release first results, likely more Jupiter-sized worlds, from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which scans thousands of stars within 3,000 lights years of Earth (one light year is 5.9 trillion miles) for telltale light “dips” caused by planets passing in front of their stars.