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Newly found planets might support life
Posted by Bijay Kuikel
Published on Wednesday, June 26, 2013
(CNN) -- Our everyday concerns -- what's for dinner, what to update on Facebook -- seem small when we consider that there's a whole universe out there where other life may exist.
Astronomers now are
upping that likelihood, announcing that they've identified a star system
with up to seven planets -- three of which could potentially host life
-- 22 light-years away.
The likelihood that
conditions could support life on at least one of those planets, given
that there are three terrestrial-mass planets in the habitable zone of
one system, is "tremendous," according to at least one scientist. The
"habitable zone" is the area near a star in which a planet can
theoretically hold liquid water. In our own solar system, Venus is close
to the inner edge of potential habitability, while Mars is closer to
the outer edge.
The discovery is the largest number of "habitable zone" planets ever found within a single system, said Guillem Anglada-Escude of the University of Gottingen, Germany, who led the team of astronomers.
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The findings are only the latest in a recent string of identifications of planets that may host life.
"As soon as our
telescopes and data analysis tools have become sophisticated enough to
find them, habitable planets are popping up everywhere," said Sara
Seager, professor of planetary science at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It's simply exhilarating
to know that potentially habitable planets are ubiquitous."
What are these planets like?
The three planets orbit a
star called Gliese 667C, part of the triple-star system Gliese 667.
They are between four and eight times the mass of the Earth, making them
"super-Earths."
If you were standing on
any of the potentially habitable planets in this system, that sun would
appear as a bright red star. The other two stars in the system "would
look like a very bright pair of stars providing as much illumination as
the full moon on Earth," Anglada-Escude said.
The planets are likely
either rocky or water worlds, meaning they're entirely covered in water.
These particular planets also appear to be "tidally locked," meaning
the same side of a planet is always facing a star. That means one side
of the planet always gets light and the other hemisphere is always in
darkness.
"With three
terrestrial-mass planets in the habitable zone, the likelihood of one of
them actually being habitable is tremendous," Seager said.
The system also likely
consists of two hot planets further in and two cooler planets orbiting
further out, although scientists are less certain that the seventh
planet exists.
Scientists determined
these characteristics of the star system using new observations gathered
from the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescope, with
existing data from the European Southern Observatory's HARPS instrument
in Chile.
Before, scientists had determined that the star Gliese 667C had three planets with one that could be a candidate for life.
The Gliese 667C star is
about one-third the mass of our sun with about 2% of its luminosity,
meaning it is much fainter. But all three of the potentially habitable
planets, and their neighbors in their solar system, lie within the
equivalent of the orbit of Mercury, meaning they are much closer to the
host star than planets in our solar system.
If they orbited our sun,
the Gliese 667C planets' surfaces evaporate and burn. But they may be
habitable because their sun is so much smaller and dimmer.
"It's an extreme scaled down version of the solar system," Anglada-Escude said.
But do they really have life?
Because they are so far
away, the composition of the atmospheres of all of these planets outside
our solar system remains unknown. Whether life truly roams or swims out
there is still to be seen.
"Whether the planets are
actually habitable would be pure speculation," Seager said. "There's
currently no way to observe surface liquid water (our habitability
requirement) or even infer the presence of surface liquid water."
Still, Anglada-Escude
says the existence of star systems packed with potentially habitable
planets, and the diversity of planets that Kepler has found, suggest
there are more exciting discoveries yet to come.
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