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Young World
Reaching for the stars
COMPILED BY SUBAJAYANTHI B
The French-led Corot mission has taken off from Kazakhstan on a quest to find planets outside our Solar System. The space telescope will monitor about 120,000 stars. The multinational mission will also study the stars directly to uncover more about their interior behaviour. Corot blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The French space agency, Cnes, is working with six international partners: Esa, Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil. Ian Roxburgh, professor of astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, the U.K., says, "The exciting part of this mission is to look for planets that are similar to the Earth." With Corot, astronomers expect to find between 10 and 40 rocky objects slightly larger than the Earth, together with tens of new gas giants similar to Jupiter, in each star field they observe. Every 150 days, Corot will move to a new field and begin observing again. Its first target field is towards the centre of the galaxy, the Milky Way.
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