There's been so much exoplanet news this week! I was in Texas the past couple of days giving a bunch of talks, so I'm trying to catch up. All the exoplanet news is way cool, but too much for one post, so I've split them up. I'll post the other parts shortly. Part 1: A trio of hot little rocks First up? The three smallest exoplanets found so far. I usually don't like to write about incremental discoveries, but this one is truly cool: all three orbit the same star, and all three are smaller than Earth! Any one of these would be a record breaker, but to find all three at once, in the same place? Amazing.
They orbit the star KOI-961 (short for Kepler Object of Interest), and were observed by the Kepler Observatory (details on how that all works can be found here). They all orbit the ...
