Latest Gliese 581 Stories
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Good news! The ESO’s HARPS telescope (or High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) team has found a potentially habitable planet around the red dwarf star Gliese 163! This brings the number of known, potentially habitable planets to 6, most of which have been discovered in the past year. This rocky planet, called Gliese 163c, is considered a superterran, or super-Earth, and is a considerable 50 light years away from Earth,...
A technique that allows radio astronomers to combine observations made simultaneously by multiple arrays has yet to detect any signs of extraterrestrial broadcast signals, Australian researchers have confirmed. In a study posted online May 29 and scheduled for publication in the Astronomical Journal, experts at the Curtin University International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research used very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to examine Gliese 581, a star which is orbited by planets...
The astronomers from that European Space Observatory have helped reveal that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zone around faint red stars. A team of astronomers estimates there are tens of billions of these rocky planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and about one hundred in the Sun's neighborhood. The team used observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. They had been searching for...
While scientists believe conditions suitable for life might exist on the so-called "super-Earth" in the Gliese 581 system, it's unlikely to be transferred to other planets within that solar system. "One of the big scientific questions is how did life get started and how did it spread through the universe," said Jay Melosh, distinguished professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. "That question used to be limited to just the Earth, but we now know in our solar system there is a lot of...
A team of scientists at Germany’s Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered a potentially habitable planet about 3.6 times as massive of Earth orbiting the star HD 85512, roughly 36.23 light years away (one light year is equivalent to roughly 5.9 trillion miles). Dan Vergano of USA Today reports that the discovery, led by the institute’s Lisa Kaltenegger, adds to the 572 planets orbiting nearby stars listed by the Extrasolar Planets Catalogue. Astronomers around the world...
Scientists said on Monday that a rocky planet outside our solar system is the first to meet key requirements for sustaining life. Modeling of planet Gliese 581d shows that it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life. The planet orbits on the outer fringes of the star's "Goldilocks zone," where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. "With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere -- a likely scenario on...
Researchers from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered a new, roughly Earth-sized planet that they believe could sustain life, representatives from both educational institutions announced on Wednesday.The investigative team discovered the new planet in a "habitable zone" (an area located at the right distance from a star in order to receive just enough stellar energy to maintain liquid water at or near the surface of...
Recent discoveries by astronomers have brought the official number of planets outside of our solar system to over 400.The team that constructed the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) reported the discovery of 32 new planets outside our galaxy.HARPS is a spectrograph that is attached to the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile.Using the spectrograph, scientists are not able to gather images of planets, but they are able to make observations based on...
An Australian magazine is giving people a chance to send a message to far-distant planets, assuming anyone is out there to listen. The messages would be sent to Gliese 581d, a water-covered world eight times the size of Earth, COSMOS Magazine said. The planet, 20 light years from Earth, is the closest Earth-type planet discovered so far. It's like a 'message in a bottle' cast out into the stars, said Wilson da Silva, editor of COSMOS. What's interesting is not just whether there's anyone...
As astronomers gaze toward nearby planetary systems in search of life, they are focusing their attention on each system's habitable zone, where heat radiated from the star is just right to keep a planet's water in liquid form.A number of planets have been discovered orbiting red dwarf stars, which make up about three-quarters of the stars close to our solar system. Potentially habitable planets must orbit close to those stars "“ perhaps one-fiftieth the distance of Earth to the sun "“...
