3 Habitable-Zone Super-Earths Found Orbiting Nearby Star

astroengine writes "Gliese 667C is a well-studied star lying only 22 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius, but it appears to have been hiding a pretty significant secret. The star has at least six exoplanets in orbit, three of which orbit within the star's "habitable zone" — the region surrounding a star that's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on their surfaces. Astronomers already knew that Gliese 667C had three worlds in orbit, one in the star's habitable zone, but the finding of three more exoplanets, two of which are also in the habitable zone is a huge discovery. Finding one small planet in a star's habitable zone is exciting, but finding three is historic. 'The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star — instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them,' said Rory Barnes, of the University of Washington, co-author of the study, in an ESO press release Tuesday (June 25)."

Comments

Re:"lying ONLY 22 light-years from Earth"...!

[tragedy]

150 years ago the thought of getting from N.Y to London in 8 hours was the stuff of fantasy. Today its an everyday thing.

Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of. The only planes in service that have the speed and range don't regularly make that kind of trip and they don't take passengers. Modern enthusiasm for advances in technology seems to be limited mostly to whatever the latest smartphone is. Also, the people clamouring for those more advanced smartphones also typically have no clue whatsoever about the actual tech specs of them and are typically just being led around by the nose by marketing. Some of us are very pessimistic about the future of real technological development, at least in the short term.

Stupid Question of the day!

[Xaedalus]

There's plenty of data both pro and con about sending a probe to explore and the timeline necessary. Has anyone ever thought about seeing if perhaps another race has sent a probe at us? And if so, how would we spot it?

We can't get there, but should try talking

[Animats]

We're finding enough potentially habitable exoplanets that it's worth sending messages to them. Some might have a civilization. It's time for SETI to start transmitting.

This is quite possible. Arecebo could communicate with a similar installation across the galaxy.

Re:"Nearby star"

[war4peace]

100 years of travel for 22 light years away.
That's 50 years of acceleration and 50 years of deceleration to travel 22 light years.
So you have to accelerate for 50 years and travel 11 light years in the process.

What's the calculated acceleration?

22 light years is 208,200,000,000,000 km.

Average speed to get there in 100 years is 208,200,000,000,000 km divided by 3,153,600,000 seconds, that's 66019.8 km/s. You need to reach that speed in 25 years of acceleration. That's 0.08 m/square second. Easily achievable, provided you don't have to carry half of Earth's mass in fuel. I think even ionic drives can get that sort of acceleration.

Ideally, considering an acceleration of 1g (constant, disregards time spend in orbit or maneuvering around, etc) you could reach 283,940 km/s in exactly 11 months (335 days).

Now all we have to do is come up with a perfectly working Bussard reactor... (http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML)

Re:Launch exploratory robots ASAP!

[HiThere]

By all means use a better propulsion system. Ion jet rockets probably are the best currently buildable. But you will still need to limit your top velocity, or you will be damaged by interstellar dust particles. Grain of sand is probably the worst to deal with. Too small to see in time to dodge, and too large to shield against. Of course, if you were going faster even smaller particles would be more dangerous. My guess is that this factor would limit you to 0.1c, but that's a wild guess. I could easily be off by a factor of 10 in either direction.

Perhaps it would help if the vehicle were preceeded by a balloon filled with ice (water). But that's rather hard to see through, and hard to manuver if you need to dodge something too large.

And the more complex you make things, the more likely it is you'll experience a breakdown along the way.

Still, one thing that we really need to do is send one of these things with an on-board telescope of moderate power. Have the ship spin slowly, and stream the pictures back to earth. You don't need a fast transmission rate as one picture/week at any given angle should suffice, and half or a quarter of that would be acceptable. But this would give us a LONG parallax line. (N.B.: I'm not talking about something with high resolution, or infrared capability, and any other exotic capability. I'm presuming that the pictures would be stitched together with software after being received. So the buffer would only need to hold one image at a time.)

Now it's true that this wouldn't show much about the target system within our lifetimes, but it might show us a great deal about things off to the side. And it would test many of our estimates of distance (which, to be frank, rest on reasonable but not directly testable assumptions). That said, even this would only directly test distances about near bodies. It's not a long enough baseline to directly test Cephid variable distances, except a few. And I'm only expecting it to verify what is already known. But it would allow us to test our model of the local 3d starspace against direct imagery.