Discovered three habitable planets in the neighborhood of our Milky ... - Epoch

corresponds to a system with three stars, where the other two suns would be seen very bright as day and at night Full Moon

A team of astronomers found that to only 22 light years from Earth , the star Gliese 667C Constellation of Scorpio, has more than six planets, and three with possibilities to contain water are the new candidates for containing life, yesterday the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

the 3.6m telescope of ESO, located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the researchers studied the known star Gliese 667C , which has a third of the Sun’s mass and is part of a three-star system Gliese 667 or GJ 667.

Guillem Anglada

Escudé Astronomers from the University of Göttingen in Germany and Mikko Tuomi, University of Hertfordshire in the UK, with a team researchers, found that the weakest of the three stars actually has more than six planets orbiting it, and in all three of them habitable. Previous studies have found three planets, one of which is in the habitable zone.

“We knew from previous studies that the star had three planets, and wanted to see if I could have any more,” Tuomi said. “Adding some new observations and reviewing previous data we were able to confirm these three, with the confidence to find some more. It was very exciting to find three low-mass planets in the habitable zone of the star “.

Gliese 667 star system “is quite close to us, in the solar neighborhood, much closer than other star systems studied with other telescopes, such as the Kepler Space Telescope (NASA), the planet hunter” ESO team stands.

If we are in one of the panetas the star Gliese 667C, astronomers report that the other two suns would be very bright as day and Full Moon at night.

Three super habitable planets are discovered lands, ie more massive than Earth but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune . They are in the area around the star in which water may be present in liquid form “if conditions allow.” To achieve these results, the team used data from HARP precision instrument (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) Scientist by Gaspare Lo Curto, plus previous files Observatory.

“This is the first time that three such planets orbiting this area are located at the same time,” says ESO.

Rory Barnes of the University of Washibgton before, from 10 stars are expected to find a potentially habitable planet, but now “we can find just one star and find several planets

“The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much larger than we might think when you consider that we can find several of them around each low-mass star,” said Barnes.

ESO astronomers analyze systems that Sun-like stars, which are very abundant in the Milky Way, planets orbiting around the same star are very hot and could hardly be habitable. “This does not happen with cooler stars and faint as Gliese 667C”.

“In this case the habitable zone is fully integrated in an orbit of Mercury’s size, much closer to the star than in the case of our Sun,” said study team.

Gliese 667C

system becomes the first example of a system in which a low-mass star hosts several potentially rocky planets in the habitable zone.

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