WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A tiny telescope has spotted a giant planet
circling a faraway star

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A tiny telescope has spotted a giant planet
circling a faraway star, using a technique that could open a new phase
of planetary discovery, scientists said Tuesday.

A telescope with a 4-inch diameter -- about the size that some backyard
astronomers might use -- tracked the periodic dimming of light from a
bright star 500 light-years away. A light-year is about 6 trillion
miles, the distance light travels in a year.

That dimming suggested the presence of a big planet regularly blocking
out a small portion of the light as it passed between the star and
Earth. Later observations by the huge Keck I telescope in Hawaii, which
has a diameter of 32.81 feet, confirmed the find.

More than 100 such exoplanets, or planets orbiting a star other than our
sun, have been found in the last decade, but most of these have been
discovered by observing stars that have a characteristic wobble,
indicating a planet is nearby.

The small telescope that found this latest planet is part of a network
of modest instruments called the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, known
as TrES, which is designed to look specifically for planets orbiting
bright stars, scientists said in e-mailed statements.

One statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said
the new find, using such a small telescope, "demonstrates that we are at
the cusp of a new age of planet discovery."

The new planet, called TrES-1, is a gas giant about the size of Jupiter,
located in the constellation Lyra ("the lyre"). It orbits its star about
once every three days at a distance of just 4 million miles, much closer
and faster than the planet Mercury goes around our sun, giving it a
temperature of around 1,500 degrees F.

"This discovery demonstrates that even humble telescopes can make huge
contributions to planet searches," said Guillermo Torres of the Harvard
astrophysics center, who coauthor a study on the finding.

The team that discovered TrES-1 includes scientists from the
Astrophysical Institute of the Canaries, the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
Lowell Observatory and the California Institute of Technology.