Sometimes we as scientists forget to think of Earth when we think of planets. At NASA, they divide things up into Helioscience, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics, as if to say our Sun isn’t a Star and our Earth isn’t a planet. Historically, these divisions are based on how differently we could study our Earth compared with other worlds, and on how much more information we can get about our Sun compared to other stars.

Over the decades, how we do science has changed, and how we understand our universe has evolved, and these 4 categories make it hard for us to know where to put the study of exoplanets, how to file papers comparing Earth and Mars terrains using rovers and people in the field, and in general, we need a new classification system.

But change is slow. 

2020 is the 25th anniversary of the discovery of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. In the past few years we’ve started finding planets with masses not too different to Earth’s mass, and it seems that every few weeks there is a new announcement about new world in some star’s habitable zone. This week is one of those weeks. In a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, a team of researchers led by Canegie’s Fabo Feng and Paul Butler announce the discovery of two super Earths, with passes 7.5 & 7.9 times the mass of Earth. These two planets orbit different red dwarf stars, and may be positioned such that they can have liquid water on their surface. These planets, along with 3 other confirmed worlds and 8 candidate worlds, expand our catalogue of more than 4000 planets outside our solar system. At this point, I’m not sure the discovery of a new world around yet another red dwarf is still news or astronomy as usual. I am seeing the bias of so many of us journalists being old enough to have grown up without exoplanets, so we’re still like “Oh cool – PLANET”. But at some point, we need to probably just admit, stars generally have planets, planets regularly exist in habitable zones, and as long as we keep looking for planets, we’re going to keep finding planets. At this point, I think that unless something truly novel is discovered, we’re going to stop calling the new planets news. If it is a particularly slow news day, we may do a periodic round up of newly found worlds.

You can get more information at:

“Cold Neptune” And Two Temperate Super-Earths Found Orbiting Nearby Stars (Carnegie)