Apologies if this has already been posted.
From
The Guardian:
The planet, the first detected so far that is enough like Earth for life to develop, orbits a star called mu Arae in the southern constellation Altar. The planet - astronomers call such things exoplanets - is only 14 times the mass of Earth and, like Earth, could be composed of rock and support an atmosphere.
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But the planet that orbits mu Arae every 9.5 days lies at the threshold of the largest possible rocky planets. The discovery, across a distance of 50 light years, was possible only because of the accuracy of an instrument called Harps, a spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6m telescope at La Silla in Chile.
