By Ron Cowen
About half of all sunlike stars host light-weight planets that are less than three times Neptune’s mass. And some of these orbs may be only a few times heavier than Earth.
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That’s the conclusion of a team of European astronomers who have announced the discovery of 32 additional planets beyond the solar system, bringing the total of known extrasolar planets to more than 400.
“These low-mass planets are everywhere,” notes team member Stéphane Udry of Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland. “Models are predicting them and we are finding them.”.