Astrophysicist Ananyeva pointed out the difficulties in finding Earth-like planets.

Planets similar to Earth exist in the universe, but modern methods do not allow them to be easily detected. This was announced on May 17 by Vladislava Ananyeva, a researcher at the Planetary Physics Department of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS).

"There are planets like Earth, and there are even a few open ones. But the smaller the mass of the planet, the more difficult it is to detect it," Ananyeva said in an interview with RIA Novosti.

When an Earth—like body orbits a sun-like star, it causes fluctuations in the radial velocity of the sun by only 10 cm per second - it is not yet possible to record such microsdrives.

But it is easier to look for such planets in red dwarfs (stars with a mass of 0.1–0.5 solar). At the same time, astronomers are much more likely to find "super—earths" - objects several times larger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune (its radius is almost four times that of Earth).

There is no clear classification of exoplanets approved by the International Astronomical Union. They were the first to discover "hot jupiters" (weighing from 0.3 to 13 Jupiter masses with an orbit of less than 10 days) — not the most common, but the most convenient for observations.

Smaller planets are called "hot neptunes" (radii from two to six terrestrial). There are also transitional types in the universe between ice giants (Uranus, Neptune) and gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn) — they are distinguished by the proportion of a hydrogen-helium atmosphere (over 50% is a gas giant, less is Neptune).

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