An Earthlike Planet Found

NASA, Nov 27 (TruthDive): Scientists claim to have discovered a potentially habitable planet which has an environment much similar to that of Earth and may contain water and even life.

Gliese 581g, located around 123 trillion miles away, orbits a star at a distance that places it squarely in the habitable – or Goldilocks – zone, Nasa said.

Gliese 581g, which some believe may be able to support human life. However, although the planet has many of the conditions necessary for us, there is some bad news’: it’s about 20 light years – or 118,000,000,000,000 miles – from Earth. To put that into perspective, if a rocket flying from Earth travelled at a tenth of the speed of light (19,000 miles a second) it would take 200 years to arrive at Gliese 581g.

The planet is thought to be one of six worlds that orbits the red dwarf star Gliese 518, which is 50 times cooler and a third of the size of the our Sun, however some astronomers doubt its existence.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581 using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope by a team of planet-hunters from University of California (UC) Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

But U.S. experts believe Saturn’s moon, Titan, is still the most likely so far to support life based on surface conditions and whether vital chemical reactions are possible.

In the paper, the authors propose a series of indices that could be used by the international community as it continues to search for signs of extra-terrestrial life.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch, first author on the new paper and an astrobiologist at Washington State University, said the team said such an index would have two main components.

“The first question is whether Earth-like conditions can be found on other worlds, since we know empirically that those conditions could harbor life,” said Schulze-Makuch. “The second question is whether conditions exist on exoplanets that suggest the possibility of other forms of life, whether known to us or not. As a practical matter, interest in exoplanets is going to focus initially on the search for terrestrial, Earth-like planets.”

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