First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet found

Source Link

A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution has announced the discovery of a planet, Gliese 581g, with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star’s “habitable zone.”

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/1086da6e0fe8.jpg[/atsimg]

Planets of the Gliese 581 System: This artist's conception shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and their host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth. The large planet in the foreground is the newly discovered GJ 581g, which has a 37-day orbit right in the middle of the star's habitable zone and is only three to four times the mass of Earth, with a diameter 1.2 to 1.4 times that of Earth. (Lynette Cook)

More interesting news.

Only 20 light years from Earth!

Now, we just need to develop the technology to travel at or near the speed of light. Whether or not that's possible for humans to do is still debatable. Even at half the speed of light, we could get there in 40 years. Hibernation chamber anyone?

Another illustration courtesy of Zina Deretsky of the National Science Foundation that shows the orbit of Gliese 581 in relation our own solar system:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/2323057cb05b.jpg[/atsimg]

Comparing the Gliese 581 to Our Solar System: The orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system are compared to those of our own solar system. The Gliese 581 star has about 30% the mass of our sun, and the outermost planet is closer to its star than we are to the sun. The fourth planet, G, is a planet that could sustain life. (National Science Foundation/Zina Deretsky)

Another thread already in progress here under another forum:

Original Thread

I did a search but it didn't turn up anything. Wasn't until I went to the home page that I saw a thread had already been posted on the subject, though it's quoting a different news source.

i'm sorry to reply on this thread. I don't know if we are allowed to or not being that there is another thread. anyways i wanted to ask can't we point hubble or another telescope at it and be able to see this planet pretty well? the reason i'm asking is because it's only 20 light years and hubble has taking pictures up 47billion light years away if i remember correctly.

reply to post by xenocide


Not sure either. I think they've changed the rules to allow separate threads of the same subject as long as they're in different forums. That's the only reason I can think of that it's still active. I expect the thread that's in Alien/UFO forum to get more attention than the Space Exploration forum. There's just more people that frequent there.

Anyway, I'm not sure about Hubble. I know in discussion about pointing a high powered telescope at the moon landing site people always say most would be too powerful to be able to focus on something so close. Other telescopes on earth are not powerful enough to see much detail.

I think Hubble would be much to powerful to see something only 20 light years away. But, I think we have other high powered telescope that would be able to pick it up with enough resolution to at least see the planet, even if it is just a blurry dot. But, with the technology that we currently have, it seems that we could be able to build a telescope that could see the planet with enough resolution to show it in High Definition.

If the hubble can view things billions of light years away how hard can it be to build the same sort of telescope but use it to see only a few light years away? It would be cheaper and a lot more helpful. Obviously it is possible.

I think they meant "First Potentially EXPLOITABLE Planet"

Isn't this the same planet that Carl Sagan mentioned in one of his 'Cosmos' episodes?

Originally posted by Nventual
If the hubble can view things billions of light years away how hard can it be to build the same sort of telescope but use it to see only a few light years away? It would be cheaper and a lot more helpful. Obviously it is possible.

Nearly impossible, but not impossible perhaps. Some researchers think they've imaged a planet 25 light years away using hubble:

Images of extrasolar planets win award for most outstanding papers in Science

They had a hard time imaging that exoplanet and it was 3 times the size of Jupiter and quite a distance from the star it orbits. Obviously the smaller the planet, the harder it will be to image, and the closer to the star, the harder because the light from the star will tend to overwhelm any image of the planet.

"The ultimate goal is the direct imaging of Earth-like planets, so as to search for biosignature gases. This task will be very much harder, since such planets will not only be considerably smaller and dimmer, but also much closer to a sun-like star. Nevertheless, with this first giant step, it does not appear impossible."

Also keep in mind the things Hubble sees that are billions of light years away are typically galaxies which like our own can be 100,000 light years across. Even a red dwarf star doesn't begin to compare in size with the size of a galaxy, and the planets are even smaller. I think for now imaging an earth-sized planet is still impossible even at only 20 light years away, but this article suggests there's some hope it may not be impossible in the future.