An artist’s impression of a planet in orbit around a red dwarf. Public domain image created by NASA.
A multi-national team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists have made a very important discovery: The first potentially habitable planet outside of our solar system.
The newly discovered extrasolar planet is the smallest yet discovered. It is estimated to have a radius 50% bigger than the Earth, so gravity on it would be about twice as strong as it is here, and it orbits a red dwarf called Gliese 581 which is 20.40 light years away (relatively close to us) in the constellation Libra.
The exoplanet is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun and so its year - a full orbit around the star - is only 13 Earth days long. But the good news is that since the red dwarf is “smaller [one third of the mass] and cooler than the Sun, the planet nevertheless would lie in its habitable zone—the region around a star with suitable temperatures for liquid water.”
Average temperatures on this “super-Earth” lie between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (32 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit), “and water would thus be liquid,” said Stéphane Udry of Switzerland’s Geneva Observatory, lead author of a paper reporting the result. “Models predict that the planet should be either rocky—like our Earth—or covered with oceans,” he added. [...]
“Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X.”
All of this thanks to what seems to be an amazing instrument:
The find was possible thanks to an instrument known as a spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, according to the group. The instrument, called the High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher, is touted as one of the most successful tools for detecting exoplanets to date.
The instrument measured wiggles in the star’s motion corresponding to velocity changes of just two to three meters per second—the speed of a brisk walk, according to the Geneva Observatory’s Michel Mayor, principal investigator for the instrument. Given the results so far, “Earth-mass planets around red dwarfs are within reach” of discovery, he predicted.
The arrow marks the approximate location of the red dwarf star Gliese 581 with respect to the constellation Libra visible in the southern sky. Image credit: World-Science.net
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April 24, 2007 at 11:25 pm
that’s it…i’m moving!
April 25, 2007 at 1:15 am
and we continue to shift ever farther from the Copernican view of the universe…lol
perhaps we are not the only self designated “special” things around…
April 25, 2007 at 3:11 am
Wow, this is really cool information! Thanks for sharing it with us.
April 25, 2007 at 4:55 am
Lol. Yea. I saw that on CNN just now.
April 25, 2007 at 8:14 am
wow! mesmerizing!
April 25, 2007 at 11:50 am
[...] UPDATE (4/25): You know what? Forget it. Pillage the Earth for all it’s worth because we officially have a backup plan! [...]
April 25, 2007 at 11:57 am
The more we (as humans) make these kinds of discoveries, the more we begin to think that maybe there’s more to living than just indulging in selfish pursuits. We marvel at the possibilities, no matter how unlikely it is that we’ll travel outside of our solar system in the next 100 years. It’s time to embrace the concept of manifest destiny and decide that universal exploration is one of our main reasons for existing.
April 25, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I read about this… it’s crazy this wasn’t all over the news here in the states. It would have been had it been Americans that discovered it.
May 2, 2007 at 1:59 pm
It’s a wonderful thing finding this, but what now. We need to take funding away from projects like this and put them into schools like Embry-Riddle. We must come up with some sort of exotic propulsion system that can get us there, ways to protect our astronauts, and most importantly, ways to get back. Until then, what good is finding this planet? One may say hope, but what good is a glass of water a thousand miles away from a dehidrated man?
May 18, 2007 at 2:50 pm
[...] In the May 3rd issue of Nature there is an article about the potentially habitable planet I wrote about here. [...]
June 20, 2007 at 4:18 pm
[...] things worth a glance: First Potentially Habitable Planet Outside the Solar System, Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason, Hip Hop Isn’t Dying, It Just Sucks, Reality [...]
September 28, 2007 at 12:57 pm
If there is water the tides would be a bitch, being that close to a large body (the red sun)
October 18, 2007 at 7:44 pm
If only we could stop waging wars on each other and stop wasting vast amounts of money on nuclear weapons,(which are too terrifying to use) then with all this saved money, (globally) I am sure we could make it out into deep space and satisfy our curiosity. There may be risks as no-one knows what’s out there, but I think it will be worth it. Every star and planet are totally individual as say a fingerprint or snow crystal. A myriad of life-forms could be waiting to be discovered, but we must remember what curiosity did to the proverbial cat.
December 1, 2007 at 2:38 am
This will be better to land human beings and inhabitate them, should earth become worse in future. Nonetheless we are now to start our manned mission to such planets
December 1, 2007 at 2:44 am
Better put your energy on exploring such planets and spend your energy on the manned mission to these planets rather than creating boundaries on the earth in the form of countries and destroying each other through weapons of mass destruction