Newly Discovered Alien Planet Ideal for Life

Science.com reported on Feb. 2, that a new planet was recently discovered in the constellation Scorpius. This comes as no surprise to scientists working on Kepler, NASA’s space-traveling telescope that scours our galaxy for new planets. The spacecraft was launched in 2009. In 2011, scientists affiliated with the project estimated that we could be sharing the Milky Way with as many as 50 billion other planets. Some of those, it turns out, may be capable of supporting life. What surprises scientists is how quickly such planets are being discovered.

Details about the planet itself

The newly discovered planet bears the not-so-catchy name GJ 667Cc. Its parent star is only 22 light- years from Earth. It has about two-thirds less mass than our sun, but is visible from ground-based telescopes. There are potentially other planets in its solar system as well. According to NASA, “the Kepler Mission…is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone.” So far, the mission seems to be a success.

Why the conditions are right for life on this planet

The planet is just the right distance from its sun for reasonable speculation that this planet may be capable of supporting life. It’s not so far away from its heat source that it would be an icy planet, but it’s no so close that it would be infernal. “This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it,” Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the Carnegie Institution for Science reported.

What this planet would be like

The view from this planet would provide a view of three suns, one in close proximity and two further away. If life did inhabit this planet, there would almost certainly be no “Silicon Valley”; the planet doesn’t have the same abundances of heavy metals as earth. That means less silicon, iron and carbon…so any life there wouldn’t be exactly as we know it. In contrast to Earth’s 365 day years, GJ 667Cc completes its solar orbit in just 28 days.

Greetings from the alien planet possible in a few hundred years

Steven Vogt, another of the studies’ authors, calls this planet “our next door neighbor” and points out that “[w]ith the GJ 667C system being relatively nearby, it…opens exciting possibilities for probing potentially habitable alien worlds in the future.” He also says that “with today’s technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards.” Not a terribly long wait considering the distance those pics would have to travel.


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