A team of astronomers announced they have discovered the smallest and potentially most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet. Five times as massive as Earth, it orbits a relatively cool star at a distance that would provide earthly temperatures as well, signaling the possibility of liquid water.
“The separation between the planet and its star is just right for having liquid water at its surface,” says astronomer and team spokesperson Stephane Udry of the Observatory of Geneva in Versoix, Switzerland. “That’s why we are a bit excited.”
But researchers do not yet know if the planet contains water, if it is truly rocky like Earth, which might make it hospitable to life as we know it, or whether it is blanketed by a thick atmosphere. “What we have,” Udry says, “is the minimum mass of the planet and its separation” from its star.
The researchers say they detected the presence of two new extrasolar planets (exoplanets) around a red dwarf star, Gliese 581, 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra, based on slight motions of the star. Their discovery brings the total number of planets orbiting Gliese 581 to three; two years ago they made the initial finding of a planet there.
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July 26th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Hundreds of new planets have been discovered by Nasa’s new space probe, sparking new hope of life outside our solar system.
Up to 140 of the newly-found planets are similar in size to Earth, scientists have said.
The Kepler probe – which constantly monitors more than 150,000 stars for tell-tale signs of planets orbiting them – also may have found five new solar systems, Nasa said.
While an exhaustive study remains to be done, the implication is that many planetary systems have multiple planets,’ William Borucki, the mission’s principle investigator said.
The data relates to the first six weeks of the probe’s four-year mission after it was launched last year.
Scientists hope the early discoveries will lead to many more, including multi-planetary systems which give life a better chance to evolve.
The Kepler space probe examines distant stars by monitoring the light they give off.
September 21st, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Sky gazers are set for a double celestial treat Tuesday when two planets – Jupiter and Uranus – will shine the brightest.
Both planets will be fully illuminated and appear disk-like, said a representative of an association of astro-enthusiasts.
The brightest object in the eastern skies after sunset will be Jupiter, the biggest planet of the solar system, said Chandrabhushan Devgun of the Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators.
Devgun asked sky gazers to use a binocular or telescope to observe the magnificent sight in the night skies.
“Even if you don’t have an instrument, observe it through your eyes. If you miss the opportunity to see it Sep 21, don’t worry. The planet will be there in the night skies for months to come,” he said.
September 29th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
he chances that future generations will one day colonise the stars have just got higher.
Astronomers tonight announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet ever found – a rocky world three times the size of our own world, orbiting a star 20 light years away.
The planet lies in the star’s ‘Goldilocks zone’ – the region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers.
# Planet’s gravity means a human could walk on the surface
# Highest average temperature is -12C – cold but survivable
# Scientists say incredible discovery points to universe full of Earth-like planets
The planet also appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could well be capable of life.
The discovery comes three years after astronomers found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star – described by astronomers as being ‘in our backyard’ in the Milky Way. Researchers say the findings suggest the universe is teeming with world like our own.
‘If these are rare, we shouldn’t have found one so quickly and so nearby,’ Dr Steven Vogt who led the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
‘The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 per cent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that’s a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.’
Planets orbiting distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. Instead, astronomers look for tell-tale gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit.
The findings come from 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The planet orbits a small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra. The planet, named Glieseg, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away – so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.
It takes just 37 days to orbit its sun which means its seasons last for just a few days. One side of the planet always faces its star and basks in perpetual daylight, while the other is in perpetual darkness.
September 29th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
The search for a faraway planet that could support life has found the most promising candidate to date, in the form of a distant world some 120,000 billion miles away from Earth.
Scientists believe that the planet is made of rock, like the Earth, and sits in the “Goldilocks zone” of its sun, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for water to exist in liquid form – widely believed to be an essential precondition for life to evolve.
It is unlikely that anyone would be able to visit planet Gliese 581g in the near future as it would take 20 years travelling at the speed of light to reach it, and many thousands of years in a spacecraft built using the best-available rocket technology.
The planet is named after its star, Gliese 581, a red dwarf found in the constellation Libra, and is the sixth planet in its solar system. Scientists said last night that it is the most habitable planet yet found beyond our own Solar System, and a prime spot for the possible existence of extraterrestrial life.
Two previous claims for the existence of earth-like planets in the same solar system were subsequently found to be overstated in that they were either too far away or too near to Gliese 581, making it too cold or too hot for liquid water and life to exist.
However, the latest discovery, made by American astronomers, put the orbit of planet Gliese 581g between the orbits of the two previous contenders for earth-like worlds, said Professor Steve Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who led the study.
“We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone – one too hot and one too cold – and now we have one in the middle that’s just right. This planet sits right between the two of them. It is right smack in the middle and it couldn’t be more in the habitable zone where liquid water and life could exist,” Professor Vogt said. “We estimate it has a mass of between three and four times that of Earth, which means it is small enough to be made of rock. It means it has a surface you could stand on and a gravity similar to Earth’s that could hold a nice atmosphere in place,” he added.
September 30th, 2010 at 3:36 am
US astronomers said Wednesday they have discovered an Earth-sized planet that they think might be habitable, orbiting a nearby star, and believe there could be many more planets like it in space.
The planet, found by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is orbiting in the middle of the “habitable zone” of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which means it could have water on its surface.
Liquid water and an atmosphere are necessary for a planet to possibly sustain life, even it it might not be a great place to live, the scientists said.
The scientists determined that the planet, which they have called Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days.
Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet and has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the leaders of the team that discovered the planet.
If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to Earth’s, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth, the researchers said.
The surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth’s, so that a person could easily walk upright on the planet, Vogt said.
Gliese 581g was discovered by scientists working on the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, during 11 years of observing the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which is only 20 light years from Earth.
For astronomers, eleven years of observation is considered a short time and 20 light years, which is roughly 117.5 trillion miles, rather close. The sun is around eight and a half light minutes from Earth.
“The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common,” said Vogt.
The planet is tidally locked to its star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, and the other is in perpetual darkness because it faces away from the star.
With surface temperatures decreasing the further one goes toward the dark side of the planet and increasing as one goes into the light side, the most habitable part of the new planet would be the line between darkness and light, which is known as the “terminator”.
The researchers estimate that the average surface temperature of the planet would be between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius).
But actual temperatures would range from “blazing hot on the side facing the star to freezing cold on the dark side,” they said.
The findings, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org, “offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said Vogt.
“Any emerging life forms on the new planet would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,” Vogt said.
In their report, the scientists in fact announce the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581, bringing the total number of known planets around this star to six.
That is the most yet discovered in a planetary system other than Earth’s solar system.
Like planet’s in Earth’s solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.
Two previously detected planets around Gliese lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side and one on the cold side of the star, and are probably not habitable.
The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.
“We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone — one too hot and one too cold — and now we have one in the middle that’s just right,” Vogt said, recalling the porridge that Goldilocks found in the children’s story “The Three Bears.”