Alpha Centauri Bb

As of this writing, the smallest known extrasolar planet ever discovered is also the closest known planet to Earth outside of our solar system neighbors. It was discovered by a European team of astronomers working at the Very Large Telescope in the Chilean high desert, and you can read more about it here:
Alpha Centauri Bb

So far no human eye or imaging chip has yet seen Alpha Centauri Bb, so little is known about the place. We know what astronomers have inferred from a masterful analysis of mountains of radial velocity data acquired from the telescopes at the VLT over a period of several Earth years and hundreds of Bb years. The motion of the pair of the Alpha Centauri stars around each other, the starspot cycle of Alpha Cen B, and the atmospheric turbulence high over the Andes mountains all dwarf the signal of B's little companion, but the computer algorithms were able to clever that signal out into the open. UC - Santa Cruz astrophysicist Greg Laughlin wrote an excellent overview of this modern scientific masterpiece here.

And what of the planet itself? It's small, only a little bit more massive than Earth, and since detectability is directly proportional to planet mass, it's an astounding feat to uncover such a little world so far away. Bb is a wild place, as well, completing a revolution around its parent star in a little over three days, baking its day side to a temperature where iron glows with incandescence and rock melts and runs like taffy. Clearly this is an interesting place to investigate, but not a good place for a summer home. With luck, there may be such a place a little ways further out from Alpha Centaur B, and if it's there, we're sure to find it with a few more years of data. It may be a long time, but either our eyes or those of our electronic surrogates will get there one day.