(Photo: NASA Ames and SETI Institute / Jason Rowe)
A simulation of the silhouette of planet 55 Cancri e passing in front of (“transiting”) its parent star, compared to the Earth and Jupiter transiting our Sun, as seen from outside the Solar System. The MOST space telescope detected the tiny dip in starlight caused when the super-Earth planet blocked a small portion of the disk of the star 55 Cancri A, which is nearly a twin to the Sun.
Astronomers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of British Columbia and the University of California at Santa Cruz, have announced they have found the "densest" planet ever . This planet has been named 55 Cancri e. and it is 60 percent larger than the Earth, and eight times as massive. Density is a measurement of the amount of matter in a given volume of something.
