YET another planet in a distant solar system may have been discovered. It
appears to have a mass slightly greater than that of Jupiter, and is orbiting
closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.
A team led by Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made the discovery using a telescope in Arizona.
They found that the frequencies of spectral lines of the Sun-like star &rgr; Coronae
Borealis periodically increase and decrease, suggesting that it is wobbling due
to the gravitational pull of a circling planet. The findings will appear in next
week鈥檚 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters (vol 483, p 111).
The number of suspected planets in other solar systems is reaching double
figures. 鈥淏ut we haven鈥檛 done more than skim the surface of the stars that are
there to search,鈥� says Noyes.
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