UCSC Scientists Help Find a New Giant, Earth-Like Planet

Like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, an international team of astronomers has found a strange new world that could have life and other civilizations.

The planet is 22 light years away and 4.5 times bigger than Earth and orbits its star's habitable zone every 28 days.

"This discovery indicates that potentially habitable planets can occur in a greater variety of environments than previously believed," according to a UCSC news release.

The discovery was announced at 7 a.m. Thursday and is published by Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be seen online here.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets," said UCSC professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Steven Vogt. "Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy. The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

Vogt and UCSC's Eugenio Rivera are part of a team led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The scientists used data from the European Southern Observatory and analyzed it with a technique that detects small wobbles in a star's motion cause by the gravity of surrounding planets.

The host star is an M-class dwarf star named GJ667C. It is the coolest and most common of seven classifications of stars and is also called a "red" star. On a scale of 1-9 with 1 being the hottest, our sun is a 7 and this one is a 9.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said.

It receives 90 percent of the light that Earth gets but absorbs the same amount of energy from its sun as does our Earth.

The team found what may be another gas-giant planet and another possible super-Earth with a 75-day orbit, but those aren't yet confirmed.

"With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds," said Anglada-Escudé, who was with Carnegie when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen.

Others on the discovery team who have gone boldly where no one else has gone include: Jeffrey Crane, Stephen Shectman, and Ian Thompson at Carnegie; Pamela Arriagada and Dante Minniti of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Nader Haghighipour of the University of Hawaii-Monoa; Brad Carter of University of Southern Queensland; C. G. Tinney, Robert Wittenmyer, and Jeremy Bailey of the University of New South Wales; Simon J. O'Toole of the Australian Astronomical Observatory; Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire; and James Jenkins of the Universidad de Chile, Camino El Observatorio.