Three habitable planets around a star - BBC

This is the first time that such a comprehensive and potentially capable of supporting life system is highlighted in the Milky Way.

“A busy habitable zone” that is how the European Southern Observatory (ESO) describes the discovery, announced Tuesday morning, the existence of three extrasolar planets around the star Gliese 667C. The international team of astronomers led this work has established that it is “super-Earth” that is a bit more massive than the Earth’s rocky planets, located at the right distance from their star (or too close or too far) to house the liquid water on their surface. However, that said liquid water, said emerging possibility of life.

Located in the constellation of Scorpio, just 22 light years away, Gliese 667C is a “red dwarf,” that is to say, a less massive star three times and a hundred times less luminous than our Sun, which is long been in the sights of hunters extrasolar planets. In November 2011, researchers at the Astrophysics Laboratory of Grenoble, had already caused a sensation by revealing that housed three planets including one located in habitable zone.

“We know now that we need only observe a single star to discover more planets than to observe ten stars looking for one potentially habitable planet,”

With new observations made by the HARPS instrument installed on the 3.60 m telescope at ESO La Silla (Chile), the team led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, University of Göttingen (Germany) and Mikko Tuomi, University of Hertfordshire (UK) has somehow doubled the lead.

It turns out that there are not three, but six (and possibly seven) planets around Gliese 667C three in the habitable zone. The event is significant: it is the first time that there are three planets theoretically able to harbor liquid water around a single star! In comparison, our solar system has only two: Earth and Mars (which is no longer …)

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“The probability of finding potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much larger than many of them are in orbit around a single low-mass star. We now know that we need only observe a single star to discover more planets than to observe ten stars looking for one potentially habitable “planet welcomes Rory Barnes, an astronomer at the University of Washington (USA) and co-author of the study.

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Vincent Coudé du Foresto, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, such discovery was inevitable. “It’s long been thought that the red dwarfs were conducive to this type of planetary system, there were of course to prove it!” He says Figaro .

study provides further food for thought on interest necessary to make these truly habitable planets climate. “Mars shows that it is not enough to be in the area to be conducive to the emergence of life,” he says. This includes the most distant planets have a dense enough atmosphere to redistribute heat surface.