who found the planet that same as earth?

Question

if i'm not mistaken..he is from france..what is his name?

Answer 1

In view of the subtle appreciation of the issue shown by the first two contributions, let's say "most closely resembles earth" shall we? It's a phrase used by the team that discovered it.

There was a tremendous upsurge of interest in the planet Gliese 851c when first discovered on 23rd April 2007 as it appeared at that time to be a habitable terrestrial, rocky planet about 5 times the mass of earth, in the star's habitable zone, and it was believed that if water existed on the planet it would be water that was in liquid form (warmer than ice. cooler than steam). Of additional interest was the fact that the star, a red dwarf, is a mere 20.4 light years away being one of the nearest 100 stars or star systems to earth.

I take it that that is what you have heard of. As it excited the imagination of a lot of people back in April.

The team that did the research that unearthed Gliese 581c (and a further planet Gliese 581d) was led by Stephane Udry of the Observatory of Geneva in Versoix, Switzerland.

What you may not have heard is that Gliese 581c is now believed to have a runaway greenhouse effect and would not be as habitable as was first thought. But Gliese 581d, being further away from the star, may yet be habitable.

Udry's group searches for smaller planets using a telescope called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), which looks for stars that wobble slightly.

They actually did the work involved at La Silla, an observatory high in the Chilean Andes mountains. Some of the team members are indeed from French observatories: Of the 11 team members, co-authors to the paper accessible via the second link, 5 are from a Swiss, 5 are from a French and 1 from a Portuguese observatory.

S. Udry, M. Mayor, C. Lovis, F. Pepe,
and D. Queloz are all from Observatoire de Gen`eve, Universit´e de Gen`eve, Switzerland.

X. Bonfils is from Centro de Astronomia e Astrof´ısica da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

X. Delfosse, T. Forveille and C. Perrier are from Laboratoire d’Astrophysique, Observatoire de Grenoble, France

F. Bouchy is from Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, Universit´e Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France

and J.-L. Bertaux is from Service d’A´eronomie du CNRS/IPSL, Universit´e de Versailles Saint-Quentin, France

The second link is the paper Udry's team has written (pdf file) entitled "The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets" and subtitled: "XI. Super-Earths (5 & 8 Earth-Masses) in a 3-planet system"

This is the abstract at the head of the paper:

"Abstract. This Letter reports on the detection of two super-Earth planets in the Gl 581 system, already known to harbour a hot Neptune. One of the planets has a mass of 5 Earth-Masses and resides at the “warm” edge of the habitable zone of the star. It is thus the known exoplanet which most resembles our own Earth. The other planet has a mass of 7.7 Earth-Masses and orbits at 0.25AU from the star, close to the “cold” edge of the habitable zone. These two new light planets around an M3 dwarf further confirm the formerly
tentative statistical trend for

i) many more very low-mass planets being found around M dwarfs than around solar-type stars

and

ii) low-mass planets outnumbering Jovian planets around M dwarfs."

Answer 2

No one has ever found a planet the "same as Earth". It is not likely that anyone will ever find such a planet. We can see only planets as large and larger than Jupiter, so it will be a long time before we can see any the size of earth...if ever.

Answer 3

No one has found a planet the same as Earth.....about 150 planets have been found using long range sensors but they are all the size and composition of Jupiter and Saturn.

Let me amend my answer to no one has found a planet the same as Earth......yet.