Astronomers find 'super Earth' planets orbiting a nearby star where life could exist

Updated June 26, 2013 08:04:03

Three "super Earth" planets have been found orbiting a nearby star at a distance where life in theory could exist, according to a record-breaking tally announced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).


The planets orbit Gliese 667C in the so-called Goldilocks Zone - a distance from the star at which the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form rather than being stripped away by stellar radiation or locked permanently in ice.

"It's exciting that we've found a nearby star that has so many planets in its habitable zone," University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes said.




"These planets are good candidates to have a solid surface and maybe an atmosphere like the Earth's, not something like Jupiter's," Dr Barnes said in a press release issued by his university.

Their close proximity "makes it like they are tidally locked, which in this case means the same hemisphere always faces the star," he said.




The new finds were made by a consortium that pored over previous data and added new observations using ESO's hi-tech observatory and US Magellan telescopes in Chile and the W M Keck Observatory on Hawaii.


Topics: space-exploration, astronomy-space, science-and-technology, france, united-states

First posted June 25, 2013 22:59:17