HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place.
European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.
"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.
An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."
Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.
Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."
Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said.
He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.
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It's times like these I find news like this a bunch of crock.
In the last few years, Astronomy agencies really started getting interested in finding "Earth like" planets....earlier this year they started launching rockets to find said "Earth-like" planets. So you mean to tell me that today already that they have gotten a few candidates and they are only 20 LIGHT YEARS away?
WTF?
Somewhere out there, some tax payer money is being wasted. Invent the hyperdrive or warp core engine first dammit!
Hell, how do we know that once we get there we won't contacr a supergerm or something?
... I wonder if this is what Europeans sounded like when Columbus and others started sailing to the 'edges' of Earth to fall off.
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