Vol 462|17 December 2009
NEWS & VIEWS
EXTRASOLAR PLANETS
Water world larger than Earth
Geoffrey Marcy
The hunt for Earth-like worlds has taken a major step forward with the discovery of a planet only 2.7 times
larger than Earth. Its mass and size are just as theorists would expect for a water-rich super-Earth.
Momentous breakthroughs in science often
come unexpectedly and serendipitously,
requiring decades of patience. Only rarely
does a long-sought scientific frontier loom so
prominently just beyond the horizon that the
next generation of instruments seems sure to
reach it. A tantalizing case for such a break-
through is presented by Charbonneau et al.1
on page 891 of this issue. They provide the
most watertight evidence so far for a planet
that is something like our own Earth, outside
our Solar System.
Charbonneau and his co-workers developed
a simple and forward-looking planet-hunting
technique. They installed a suite of eight
amateur-sized telescopes (with 40-cm-diam-
eter mirrors), each with a sensitive charge-
coupled-device light detector that measures the
near-infrared brightness (wavelengths of about
700–900 nanometres) of a star. Any star whose
brightness dims for about an hour, and repeats
that dimming like clockwork over the course of
days and weeks, is probably doing so because
an orbiting planet is crossing briefly in front
of it, blocking a fraction of the star’s light. The
amount of dimming directly indicates the size
of the planet relative to that of the star. From
a large sample of nearby stars2, Charbonneau
et al. have smartly chosen the 2,000 of smallest
radii, so that near-Earth-sized planets would
block at least 1% of a star’s light, rendering such
worlds detectable.
Charbonneau’s team1 has found that the
small, faint star GJ 1214 undergoes repeated
dimming of 1.3% for 52 minutes every 1.6 days.
The only plausible interpretation is that a planet
orbits the star with an orbital period of 1.6 days
and that it has a radius that is 12% that of the
star. Good estimates of the star’s radius (21%
that of the Sun) put the planet’s radius at only
2.7 Earth radii. Such a small planet orbiting
a star other than the Sun is an extraordinary
find. With the tools currently available, only
one other extrasolar planet has been reported
that is thought to be close in size to Earth,
namely CoRoT-7b, at 1.7 Earth radii. The new
planet, which is only about 13 parsecs away, is
named GJ 1214b. Importantly, it pulls gravi-
tationally on its host star, causing the star to
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
Silicate
Iron and mantle
nickel core
Water
Hydrogen and
helium?
Figure 1 | A water-rich super-Earth? The newly
discovered1 extrasolar planet, GJ 1214b, probably
contains a huge amount of water, surrounding
an inner core of iron and nickel, and an outer
mantle of silicate rock, and may have a small
atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Only
2.7 times larger than Earth, and just 13 parsecs
away, this super-Earth brings astronomers closer
to discovering Earth-like planets.
move with a speed of 12 m s−1, which the team
has detected through measurements of wave-
length shifts in the star’s light (the Doppler
effect). The planet’s inferred mass is a mere 6.6
Earth masses, which, when combined with its
radius, leads to a density of 1.9 g cm−3. By con-
trast, Earth’s average density is much higher,
at 5.5 g cm−3. Because water has a low density
of about 1 g cm−3, the chemical composition
of the new planet is probably some admix-
ture of rock and water, with perhaps a small
atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.
Could this planet have a solid surface suitable
for hosting organic-rich ponds and lakes? Some
astronomical background offers a good guess.
The protoplanetary disks of dust and gas swirl-
ing around young stars are the sites of planet
formation. The disks are made up of the same
admixtures of H and He gas, carbon, nitrogen
and oxygen compounds, and iron and nickel
metals found in nearly all of the stars in our
Galaxy, including the Sun. Solid dust particles
made of Fe, Ni, silicates and ices stick together
and grow into ever larger planetesimals,
forming the basic cores of all planets.
The relative amounts of these solid
constituents vary only modestly
among different protoplanetary disks,
for two reasons. First, the abundances
of the atomic elements are nearly the
same, within factors of two, from star
to star, with C, N, O, silicon, mag-
nesium and Fe being the building
blocks of the solid material. Second,
the highly negative Gibbs free energy of
carbon monoxide and silicates locks up
as much oxygen as the limiting reagents —
C and Si — permit, leaving plenty of oxygen
to form water ice, despite its higher Gibbs free
energy. Thus, silicates and water ice dominate
the mass budget of the solid material in the
cold regions of protoplanetary disks, along
with the Fe and Ni dust grains.
That solid material forms the building blocks
of large planets such as Saturn and Neptune,
and perhaps smaller planets as well, such as the
new one1. But the density of 1.9 g cm−3 for this
new planet imposes a constraint on the rela-
tive amounts of each constituent. To keep the
planet’s density that low requires that it contains
large amounts of water. If the planet were pure
Fe and silicates, its density would be similar to
Earth’s. It must contain a huge amount of water,
roughly 50% by mass.
The wild card is the amount of H and He
gas in the atmosphere. Spooning additional H
and He (of low density) onto a planet makes
its density lower, which can be compensated
for by increasing the amount of Fe in the core
to bring the overall density to that measured,
1.9 g cm−3. But the planet-building environ-
ment is unlikely to spawn planets composed
of mostly Fe and H/He, but very little water.
Any planet that contains Fe, rock and H/He
would have also retained correspondingly large
amounts of water. Thus, it is likely that this
853
NEWS & VIEWS
new world has nearly 50% of its mass in water
surrounding an Fe/Ni core and a silicate mantle
(Fig. 1). It probably has an extraordinarily deep
ocean, which would be liquid given its equi-
librium surface temperature of some 190 °C
due to heating from the host star. A sauna-like
steam atmosphere is possible, with slow photo-
lytic and hydrodynamic loss of that atmosphere
caused by ultraviolet-light irradiation. A thin
H/He outer atmosphere is also possible.
And so comes the profound anthropocentric
question. If this planet is 50% water, is it really
kin of our Earth? Or did it form in a manner
similar to that of Saturn or Neptune, with a
rocky core that acquired large amounts of ices
and gas gravitationally? By contrast, Earth has
only 0.06% water, and very little H and He gas,
having formed in a dry environment. This new
planet is close to Earth in size, but perhaps not
next of kin.
Nonetheless, Charbonneau’s team1 has high-
lighted a promising future for the discovery of
Earth-like worlds. Their efforts are just begin-
ning, with smaller and rockier planets yet to be
DNA REPLICATION
Prime-time looping
Nicholas E. Dixon
When the replication machinery copies DNA, it must unwind the double
helix in one direction while synthesis of one of the strands proceeds in the
other. Making transient DNA loops may solve this directional dilemma.
If you are a cell about to divide, you will first
need to use a multi-protein machine called a
replisome to simultaneously make copies of
both strands of your chromosomal DNA so
that one strand can be passed to each daugh-
ter cell. Replisomes have long been thought to
couple synthesis of both DNA strands by form-
ing a ‘trombone loop’ of DNA that expands
and relaxes as synthesis takes place discontinu-
ously on one of the strands. Two papers, one
by Pandey et al.1 on page 940 of this issue and
another by Manosas et al.2 published in Nature
Chemical Biology, show that a second type of
loop, called the ‘priming loop’, is transiently
produced in the replisome.
The replisome faces special challenges as
it makes new DNA at rates that can approach
1,000 nucleotides per second. Unlike the
machines that make proteins and RNA, which
work relatively sluggishly and in a linear fash-
ion, the replisome must simultaneously copy
two strands of DNA that are aligned in oppo-
site directions (5ʹ to 3ʹ and 3ʹ to 5ʹ). Replisome
chemistry obeys two rules. The first is that
a DNA polymerase (the component of the
replisome that synthesizes new DNA from a
template strand) can extend the newly formed
DNA chain only in the 5ʹ to 3ʹ direction. This
means that it can continuously copy only one
854
found. Meanwhile, precise Doppler measure-
ments may reveal the gravitational wobbles of
stars caused by Earth-like planets in tight orbits.
Most promising is NASA’s Kepler mission.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler is monitor-
ing 100,000 stars and is able to detect dimming
as small as one part in ten thousand of their
normal brightness, rendering truly Earth-sized
planets easily detectable. And someday, great
space-borne interferometers (such as NASA’s
Space Interferometry Mission) and enormous
cameras will be launched, able to detect, image
and spectroscopically analyse the landscapes,
oceans and atmospheres of nearby rocky
planets. These techniques will surely answer
the question Aristotle, Epicurus and Demo-
critus posed 2,400 years ago regarding Earth’s
unique status in the Universe. ■ 5ʹ to 3ʹ direction to separate the two strands of
Geoffrey Marcy is in the Department of
Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley,
Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
e-mail: gmarcy@berkeley.edu
1. Charbonneau, D. Nature 462, 891–894 (2009).
2. Lépine, S. Astron. J. 130, 1680–1692 (2005).
3b 5b
5b 3b
Okazaki
fragment
Template
DNA
Helicase
Polymerase
3b
3b Primase
Lagging-strand
‘trombone loop’
Leading Primer
strand 5b
3b 5b Priming site
Figure 1 | DNA replication by a minimal replisome.
During DNA replication by the replisome
components, the DNA strands are separated by
the helicase enzyme and replicated by the leading-
and lagging-strand DNA polymerases. As DNA
can be copied only in the 5ʹ to 3ʹ direction, the
polymerase continuously copies the leading
strand, but the lagging strand is made in shorter
pieces, or Okazaki fragments, that are joined
together later. DNA synthesis begins by extending
a nucleic-acid primer that is synthesized at
priming sites by the primase enzyme.
© 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
NATURE|Vol 462|17 December 2009
of the two DNA strands, called the leading
strand. The lagging strand must be made in
shorter pieces that are joined together later.
These pieces, or Okazaki fragments, are a few
thousand bases in length and each is made
every few seconds.
The second rule is that a DNA polymerase
cannot start a DNA chain — it can only extend
a pre-existing DNA or RNA chain, called a
primer. So all cells have a specialized enzyme,
the primase, that makes the first RNA primer
for each DNA chain. A new primer must there-
fore be made every few seconds to be used for
Okazaki-fragment synthesis on the lagging-
strand template. This single-stranded template
DNA is produced by the helicase, a component
of the replisome that, in bacteria, moves in a
the double helix (Fig. 1). And herein lies the
problem — the primase needs to be associated
with the helicase to function, but the primers
on the lagging strand are made in the direc-
tion opposite to the movement of the heli-
case. Moreover, primer synthesis is relatively
sluggish, taking about a second or so.
There are three possible solutions to the
replisome’s problem. One is for the whole repli-
some to pause while the primer on the lagging
strand is made, then to resume its work; such
pauses have been reported by the van Oijen
group3 during primer synthesis by the bacterial
virus (bacteriophage) T7 replisome (Fig. 2a).
The second solution is for the primase, once
clamped onto the lagging-strand template
by the helicase, to be promptly released to
make its primer at leisure, as happens with the
Escherichia coli replisome4 (Fig. 2b).
The third solution is for the replisome to
continue leading-strand synthesis while the
helicase–primase complex takes its time to
make the primer. The helicase continues to
unwind DNA in the forward direction while
the physically linked primase makes a primer
in the opposite direction. This arrangement
produces a transient single-stranded DNA
loop in the lagging-strand template, termed the
priming loop, which is subsequently released
to become part of the trombone loop when
the primer is passed to the lagging-strand
polymerase (Fig. 2c).
The new reports1,2 use elegant single-mol-
ecule experiments to provide the first direct
experimental evidence for priming-loop for-
mation by the bacteriophage T7 and T4 repli-
somes. Pandey et al.1 worked with the whole
T7 replisome, which has an unusual structure
in that its primase and helicase are part of the
same protein, so primase release is impossible.
The authors used short DNA templates that
were already primed on the leading strand,
with priming sites (DNA sequences required
for primer synthesis) on the lagging strand.
Although lagging-strand primer synthesis
occurred about 50% of the time, synthesis of
the leading strand showed no sign of pausing
while a primer was made. Next, the authors1
employed a technique called fluorescence