January 27, 2006	Friday	Zilhaj 26, 1426

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 26: A frigid planet five times the size of Earth has been discovered by an international team of scientists, a US laboratory announced on Wednesday.

The new planet, dubbed OGLE-2005-BLG-290 Lb, is the smallest spied yet outside Earth’s solar system and orbits a red dwarf star, according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco.

A cool ‘parent star’ and large orbit imply that the planet’s surface temperature is close to 249 degrees Celsius below zero.

The planet likely has a rocky surface covered by frozen seas, according to the laboratory.

“That fact that we stumbled on one means there are thousands of them out there,” said Kem Cook, an astronomer who is a member of Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork, which took part in the discovery.

“It’s got a solid core. Its mass is low enough that it couldn’t hold itself together if it were just gas.”

Scientists using telescopes in Chile, Australia and South Africa deduced the planet’s existence in July of 2005 using a “microlensing” light-analysis technique based on an idea of Albert Einstein, according to the US laboratory.

“Microlensing can tell us how common planets are in distant parts of the galaxy and probe details of planetary formation that other techniques cannot,” Cook said. “Were not going to discover planets to which NASA can fly.”

The new planet is in the Sagittarius constellation, not far from the central bulge of Earth’s galaxy, and takes about a decade to circle its dwarf star.

The discovery was an effort involving 32 institutions in France, Poland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, United States, South Africa and Japan and the United Kingdom. —AFP