New Extrasolar Planet Found!

Above is an artist's conception of the newly discovered rocky planet.
A new extrasolar planet found! The planet is five times the size of Earth yet the smallest extrasolar planet to be found so far. The planet is a rock and ice planet, the most like Earth than any other extrasolar planet found yet. It has a solid core, its mass is too low to be a gas planet and still hold itself together. It orbits a red dwarf star that is five times less massive than our sun, making one full orbit in about ten years. The planet and its parent star (the star it orbits around) lay in the constellation Sagittarius, near the center of the Milky Way more than 20,000 light years away(Don't get sucked into the black hole! =]).
So far more than 200 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the Milky Way, most are gas giants around the size of Jupiter and Saturn. These planets orbit their parent star at distances less than the distance from the Earth to the sun, though this newly found planet orbits at a distance tree times greater.
It is estimated by its parent star and large orbit, that this planet's surface temperature is around 428 to 364 degrees below zero. This is much to cold for liquid water, yet astronomers believe that there may be frozen oceans under this planet's rock and ice surface.
This star was found using the technique called microlensing using the observations of two stars and their light, this is not used to find near by planets only extrasolar planets in distant parts of the galaxy. This newly found planet is only the third extrasolar planet to have been discovered through microlensing. Most extrasolar planets are found using the technique called Doppler shift though, in this technique they use light shifts to find planets, this technique is used mostly for closer extrasolar planets and gives more precise measurements. Most planets found by the Doppler shift have been gas giants.

For more information and the full articles go to:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Closer_To_Home.html
and
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/Rocky_planet.html