Scientists develop method for mass discovery of planets

Polish scientists have developed a method to discover planets "en masse," and have since discovered 46 objects in our galaxy which may prove to be planets. Development of the method resulted from a project carried out to search for so-called "dark matter." The project, called the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), has been running for several years under the guidance of professor Andrzej Udalski of the Astronomic Observatory at Warsaw University. A so-called "photometric method" was used in monitoring 52,000 stars for 32 days, with each star being observed over 800 times. It is most likely that the majority of the discovered celestial bodies are red dwarfs and planets. The first planet outside of the solar system was discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan 10 years ago. (Rzeczpospolita, p. A4) M.T.