Firstly, says Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian team, it suggests that further planetary systems await detection.

ECONOMIST: Planet hunting

In Guadeloupe, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will study radio signals from Galileo orbiting Jupiter.

CNN: Scientists, Web watchers poised for eclipse '98

Dr Patrick Slane is from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BBC: Cosmic rays: Fermi telescope settles mystery of origin

Another solution, that championed by Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would be to give Pluto a sort of astronomical dual citizenship.

ECONOMIST: Pluto out in the cold

The team includes David Charbonneau and David Latham from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, Timothy Brown from the National Center for Atmospheric research, Colorado, and Michel Mayor from the Geneva Observatory.

BBC: We saw it too, say astronomers

"I think it's an amazing technological achievement to be able to be able to detect small rocks like this, " said Francois Fressin, a co-author of the paper based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

BBC: Exoplanet Kepler 37b is tiniest yet - smaller than Mercury

Now Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have looked at markedly higher energies - less subject to absorption in those gas layers - using Europe's XMM-Newton telescope and the recently launched Nustar telescope.

BBC: First glimpse of a black hole's spin

What makes this result so unequivocal is that another team of planet hunters at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, have independently verified it by analysing four years of their own observations.

ECONOMIST: Planet hunting