Artist's impression of Gliese 581 e

After more than four years of observations using the most successful low-mass-exoplanet hunter in the world, the HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-metre ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile, astronomers discovered the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, “e”, in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our Earth. It circles its host star in 3.15 days and is part of a planetary system that includes four known planets.

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