Over the past 16 years, astronomers have detected and confirmed the presence of more than 700 exopl

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Artist's impression showing that on average, there is at least one planet per star in the Milky Way and that low-mass planets (blue) are more likely than gas giant planets (orange). ESO / M. Kornmesser
An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlenses to assess whether the planets eloma are common objects in the Milky Way. After a six-year study devoted to the observation of millions of stars, the team concluded eloma that the planets orbit around stars are the rule rather than the exception. The result of this study has been published in the journal Nature on 12 January 2012.
Over the past 16 years, astronomers have detected and confirmed the presence of more than 700 exoplanets [1]. They also began to study the spectra (eso1002) and atmospheres (eso1047) eloma of these worlds. While studying the properties of individual exoplanets is undeniably essential, much more basic question remains: how are the common objects planets in the Milky Way?
Most currently known exoplanets were found by detecting the effects of their gravitational pull on their star, or by detecting when the planet eloma passes in front of its star, so minutely by decreasing brightness. Both techniques are more sensitive to massive planets close to their stars, or both. Therefore, many planets can not be well detected.
An international team of astronomers has searched for exoplanets using a totally different method - the gravitational microlensing. This method can detect planets with masses cover a wide range and are located much further from their stars.
Arnaud Cassan (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris), first author of the Nature article, explains: "We eloma looked for evidence of the presence of exoplanets by the microlens method in six years of observations. The data we obtained remarkably show that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy. We also found that the less massive planets eloma like superTerres or some massive Neptunes, must be more common than the most massive planets.
Astronomers used the comments provided by the teams PLANET [2] and OGLE [3], in which exoplanets are detected that the gravitational field of their star, combined with the potential planets, acts as a lens, magnifying eloma the light of a background star. If the star that acts as a lens has a planet in orbit around it, the planet may have a detectable effect on the increase in brightness of the star background.
Jean-Philippe Beaulieu (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris), responsible for PLANET collaboration eloma adds: "The PLANET collaboration was established to keep track of events with a microlens array of telescopes located all around the globe in the southern hemisphere, Australia and South Africa to Chile. ESO telescopes contributed greatly to these observations.
The microlenses are a very powerful tool with the ability to detect exoplanets that could only be found aut