Scientists Discover the Tiniest Planet Ever, Kepler 37 b: NASA Find Planet 'A Lot like Mercury'

While the remarkably non-descript name might say otherwise, the recently discovered exosolar planet Kepler 37 b is a very special find. Researchers say it is the smallest planet ever found, within our solar system or otherwise.

Researchers found the planet while using NASA's Kepler space telescope to examine planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star that is 200 light years away (or 1,175,699,960,000,000 miles, in non-science talk). The star is slightly smaller than our own sun and appears to have 3 planets orbiting it.

Kepler 37 b is a lot like Mercury in our own solar system in that it is too close to its star to support life as we know it.
"Any water on the surface would disappear very quickly," Barclay says. "There is almost no chance of an atmosphere or liquid on the surface," said Thomas Barclay, research scientist and lead author of the study announcing the discovery of the tiny planet, in an interview with Scientific American

The diminutive planet is only 80% the diameter of Mercury and completes an orbit of its Kepler 37 every 13 days. Planets are indentified by "winks" in brightness as a planet passes in front of its star. The reduction in brightness from Kepler 37 b was so small- just 0.002 percent- that it could have easily been mistaken for a natural fluctuation of the star's burning. These keen scientists, however, noticed a pattern in the barely there dimming.

With these types of small planet finds, there is always the chance that the discovery is a fluke but Barclay claims that he is 99.5% certain that Kepler b is a real planet.

The Kepler telescope was built to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system, and since its launch in 2009, has confirmed more than 100 new planets with thousands more waiting in line.

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