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Potential ‘Goldilocks’ Planet Found
The newly discovered planet is depicted in this artist's conception, showing the host star as part of a triple-star system. The diagram below shows the orbits of the detected planets around the host star in relation to the habitable zone. Images courtesy of Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Carnegie Institution.
A new-found planet is in a ‘just-right’ location around its star where liquid water could possibly exist on the planet’s surface. A team of international astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star in a habitable zone, where it isn’t too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist. The planet, GJ 667Cc, has an orbital period of about 28 days and with a mass about 4.5 times that of the Earth. The star that it orbits is quite interesting. It is an M-class dwarf star and is a member of a triple star system and appears to be quite different from our Sun, relatively lacking in metallic elements.
The team said this discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.
“This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets,” said Steven Vogt from UC Santa Cruz, one of the scientists involved in the discovery. “Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy. The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets.”
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Read the rest of Potential ‘Goldilocks’ Planet Found (529 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Extrasolar Planets, Keck Observatory
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