News like this will become much more frequent in the next few years – until that one day, probably in my natural lifetime, when we will discover a pale blue dot. What do we do then, and what effect will it have on humanity?
But the new âsuper-Earthâ? is by far the smallest planet seen circling a commonplace star. The team discovered it while observing a star called Gliese 876 from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Gliese 876 is a red dwarf, one-third of the mass of the Sun, and lies just 15 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.