Einstein's theory holds that matter and energy distort space, and massive bodies such as planets and stars travel in this warped space.
It appears that ordinary matter -- all of the stuff that we can see, such as planets and stars -- makes up only 4.9% of all the universe.
In other words, the gap between the heaviest-known planets and the smallest stars has all but closed.
The analysis of the CMB data, released last Thursday, indicates that only 15.5% of the Universe's matter is what we would call "normal" - that is, the atomic material from which planets, stars and galaxies are built.
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This is easily enough to detect Jupiter-like planets around distant stars, and it should also be enough to detect smaller, Uranus-like planets around stars within the sun's stellar neighbourhood.
It will study the clouds of gas and dust that go into making stars and planets.
By contrast, the data on which Newton and Einstein built their theories were from stars, planets and moons.
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When working, it splits light into its component colours, to reveal information about the chemical content, temperature and motion of planets, comets, stars, interstellar gas and galaxies.
In the second decade of this century, Esa plans to launch the Darwin flotilla - a fleet of four or five spacecraft that will hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars and analyse their atmospheres for signs of extra-terrestrial life.
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And we have more than 200 planets around other stars that we know about today, and also about what we may expect to discover in the future in our own solar system.
Both planets are "fluffy, " gaseous, Saturn-size worlds, where temperatures quickly rise and fall from balmy to near boiling, as the planets periodically swing close to their stars and then spin away in an elliptical minuet, the researchers reported.
But if stars and planets really are different, where should the line between the two be drawn?
On a clear night, with the stars and planets blazing above you, it could be breathtakingly beautiful, he said.
In theory, this should provide a clear distinction between stars and planets.
It is that tiny asymmetry which produced a universe with enough tangible stuff in it to form galaxies, stars, planets and, ultimately, people.
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Between them, the two techniques should thus provide a more complete census of the population of Uranus-like and larger planets around other stars.
By extension, its discovery would help explain the presence of stars, planets and humans, and thus rank as one of the biggest coups for modern-day physics.
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Besides requiring astronomers to dream up a new mnemonic for their stellar classification, the existence of a grey area between stars and planets reveals the extent to which the processes of planetary and stellar formation are still a mystery.
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This is the second system discovered where a planet is orbiting two stars, and the first system discovered with multiple planets orbiting two stars.
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Each one, Vogt said, is like a Rorschach test for the theorists, offering plenty of ways to look at this brand-new material and many new thoughts on the origins of the stars, their planets, their orbits and their life spans.
Then they combined their findings with earlier surveys, which used other detection techniques, to create a statistical sample of stars and the planets that orbit them, which they say is representative of the galaxy.
Kepler is searching for Earth-like planets around far-flung stars, and the Mars Science Laboratory will sample the Red Planet's geology looking for the building blocks of life - though it will not explicitly look for life itself.
And because Gaia will track anything that passes across its e2v CCDs, it is likely also to see countless objects that have hitherto gone unrecorded - such as asteroids, planets beyond our Solar System, and tepid stars that never quite fired into life.
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They have used similar observations of more distant stars to find "exoplanets" (planets orbiting stars other than the sun) and in a few rare cases, to measure characteristics of the exoplanet atmospheres.
The question now is not are there planets orbiting distant stars, or even how many, but what do these planets look like and, crucially, could any support life?
Secondly, the detection of multiple planets demolishes once and for all the lingering doubts of some astronomers that the single planets found around other stars are not planets at all, but small, faint components in otherwise conventional binary star systems.
The problem is that brown dwarfs have been discovered orbiting other stars, and it is thought that planets can sometimes be ejected from their natal solar systems as a result of gravitational interactions, and may thus be found drifting in space.
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