Travel a mere 22 light years from Earth and you’ll find a planet that scientists believe is the most likely to be able to host water in its liquid state.
A report to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters states that the planet — formally known as GJ 667Cc — circles around a relatively cool star, gets about 90 per cent of the light that the Earth does and has a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth. So just a touch bigger, but that’s not necessarily a problem.
Most of the energy hitting the planet should be infrared, so more of it will be absorbed by the planet according to comments attributed to Professor Chris Tinney of the University of NSW, a member of the research team.
“This means that overall the planet absorbs about the same amount of energy from its star as the Earth absorbs from the Sun: so that would give the planet the right temperature, if it has a rocky surface and a wet atmosphere, to host liquid water. And liquid water is seen as an essential pre-condition for the development of life.”
The same star had previously been observed to host a “Super-Earth”, labelled as GJ 667Cb, but its orbital period is too short to keep the temperature of the planet at a likely temperature to support life.
[The Astrophysical Journal Letters]
Image: Artist impression by Guillem Escudé, Carnegie: (l to r) orbiting planets GJ 667Ca and GJ 667Cb; star GJ667C (centre) and planet GJ 667Cc (foreground)
Lillee
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 3:42 PM“formally known as GJ 667Cc” now known as Vulcan
Bluey
Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:28 PMTerra Australis – formerly known as GJ 667C.
Aash
Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 1:51 AMWhenever I read articles like these, I can’t help but think of our slightly over-sized arrogance in the assumption that a planet has to be “earth-like” to sustain life. Afterall, even on our planet there are a whole host of completely different ecosystems that sustain life in their own way and yet would be unable to sustain the organisms from other ecosystems. What is to say that water is actually required to sustain life? We’ve already started to get evidence that not all organic entities are carbon based… But anyways… As I said before, I personally just find our arrogance to be a tad ridiculous.
Osiris Fox
Monday, February 6, 2012 at 4:56 PMActually, all life on earth is carbon based. They observed bacteria that appeared to be able to use cyanide when under extreme environmental pressure to do so, but even that claim is dubious. Also, that same bacteria evolved from bacteria that needed carbon to evolve.
The likely hood is that if you live in the 3rd dimension. You need water and carbon for life.
If all you know is red cars (and the conditions required for red cars to exist), why the hell would you go searching for mythical blue cars, especially when the only blue car you found, is actually a red car with a blue shine, but is still a red car.