Meet GJ 367b, an iron planet smaller and denser than Earth

Keele (UK): As our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, small grains of dust and ice swirled around, leftover from the formation of the Sun. Through time, they collided and stuck to each other. As they grew in size, gravity helped them clump together. One such rock grew into the Earth on which we live.

We now believe that most of the stars in the night sky are also orbited by their own planets. Astronomers have already found more than a thousand gas-giant planets, large, gaseous bodies similar in size to Jupiter. The focus now is on looking for rocky, Earth-sized planets. We expect that these will be similarly abundant but, being much smaller, they’re harder to find.

A new paper published in the journal Science documents the latest discovery of a small planet, assigned the catalogue number GJ 367b. This exoplanet was found by a team, of which I was a member, led by Dr Kristine Lam of the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center.