THE search for Earth-like worlds hotted up last week with the launch of a new telescope that will scout for small, rocky planets orbiting other stars.
More than 200 extrasolar planets have already been found. Most are “gas giants”, similar in mass to Jupiter, which exert a gravitational tug on their parent stars big enough to be seen by ground-based telescopes.
In contrast, the Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (COROT) telescope, launched on 27 December from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, will be able to detect planets just two or three times the size of ours. It will orbit 900…
