Astronomers discover closest potentially habitable planet: Wolf 1061c

The closest potentially habitable planet ever found has been spotted by Australian scientists, and it's just 14 light-years away. That’s 126 trillion kilometres from Earth, which sounds impossibly far, but when you consider that our closest planetary neighbour, Mars, is 249 million km away, that handful of light-years doesn’t seem so bad in the scheme of things.

Named Wolf 1061c, the newly discovered planet is located in the constellation Ophiucus, and its star is the 35th closest star from Earth – that we know about. The team behind the discovery says it's orbiting a red dwarf 'M-type' star called Wolf 1061, alongside two other planets. All three are suspected to be rocky like Mars, rather than gaseous like Neptune.

“It is a particularly exciting find because all three planets are of low enough mass to be potentially rocky and have a solid surface,” said lead researcher Duncan Wright, an astronomer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). ”The middle planet, Wolf 1061c, sits within the 'Goldilocks zone' where it might be possible for liquid water – and maybe even life – to exist.”