UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa., Feb. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers said they have discovered the smallest planet yet detected in a far-away solar system.
The team, headed by Alex Wolszczan of Penn State University -- who was the discoverer in 1992 of the first planets ever found outside the solar system -- found the small planet within an extended cloud of ionized gas.
The new planet is unusual because it orbits a rapidly spinning and potentially lethal neutron star called a pulsar. Wolszczan said it orbits within a planetary system that seems remarkably like a half-size version of our own solar system -- even though the star these planets orbit is quite different from the sun.
"Despite the extreme conditions that must have existed at the time these planets were forming, Nature has managed to create a planetary system that looks like a scaled-down copy of our own inner solar system," Wolszczan said.
The star at the center of the system is a pulsar named PSR B1257+12. It is an extremely dense and compact neutron star, the leftover from a massive star that died in a violent explosion 1,500 light years away in the constellation Virgo.
