The k2p blog

Image via Wikipedia: Habitable zone

From just a week ago “Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011″.

A pessimistic forecast perhaps because astronomers may have found the most Earth-like alien planet to date, and it’s located only a short distance away, cosmically speaking. The team says that the planet’s proximity to its sun, coupled with the ease with which it was detected, suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with habitable worlds.

Science reports that:

Gliese 581g looks like a game-changer. Detected from the minuscule amount of gravitational influence it exerts on its star, the planet lives a mere 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra. Gliese 581g is the sixth world discovered around its sun—and the fourth most distant. Yet its orbit brings it closer to its parent star than Mercury is to our sun. Still, it’s squarely within the habitable zone, because the planet’s star, which is a type known as a red dwarf, contains only about 30% of the sun’s mass and shines with only about 1% of its brightness, the researchers will report in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Read the article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/09/astronomers-find-most-earth-like.html

Tags: Astronomy, Extrasolar planet, Gliese 581g, Habitable planet

This entry was posted on September 30, 2010 at 7:27 am and is filed under Astronomy, Science, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.