https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science/nearby-earth-planet-found
A new earth-like planet has been discovered 16 light years away.
A UNSW-led team of researchers has discovered a potentially habitable Earth-like planet that is only 16 light years away.
The "super-Earth" planet, GJ 832 c, takes 16 days to orbit its red-dwarf star, GJ 832, and has a mass at least five times that of Earth.
It receives about the same average stellar energy as Earth does, because red dwarfs shine more dimly than our Sun, and may have similar temperatures to our planet.
Team member and Head of UNSW's Exoplanetary Science research group, Professor Chris Tinney, says that if the planet has a similar atmosphere to Earth it may be possible for life to survive, although seasonal shifts would be extreme.
"However, given the large mass of the planet, it seems likely that it would possess a massive atmosphere, which may well render the planet inhospitable. A denser atmosphere would trap heat and could make it more like a super-Venus and too hot for life," says Professor Tinney.
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In 2014, we reported on a "potentially habitable" exoplanet five times the mass of Earth found 16 light years away. Now we bring you a "potentially habitable" exoplanet at least 4.25 times the mass of Earth found 14 light years away:
"While a few other planets have been found that orbit stars closer to us than Wolf 1061, those planets are not considered to be remotely habitable," Dr Wright says.
The three newly detected planets orbit the small, relatively cool and stable star about every 5, 18 and 67 days. Their masses are at least 1.4, 4.3 and 5.2 times that of Earth, respectively. The larger outer planet falls just outside the outer boundary of the habitable zone and is also likely to be rocky, while the smaller inner planet is too close to the star to be habitable.
[...] The UNSW team made the discovery using observations of Wolf 1061 collected by the HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6 metre telescope in La Silla in Chile.
Three planets orbiting Wolf 1061 [full paper]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Jaruzel on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:43AM
So... not like Earth, at all then?
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:48AM
When it comes to exo-planets, "earth-like" means rocky planet, rather than gas giant.
(Score: 2, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:12AM
Earth-like [wikipedia.org]
So, with other words, almost everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:48AM
Venus-like Planet Found 16 Light-years Away
Fixed for you.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:51AM
It's more like Planet-unlike-anything-that-we-have-in-our-solar-system Found 16 Light-years Away.
Orbiting a red dwarf? No. 16-day year? No. Rocky planet five times more massive than the Earth? No. Extreme seasonal shifts? No. Massive atmosphere (comparative to that of the Earth, not that of a gas giant)? No. Hotter than Venus? No.
It would be a very interesting planet to study, however, precisely because we don't have anything like it in our solar system.
(Score: 3, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:29PM
For the layman: Big-Rock-Thing-Found-A-Long-Ass-Distance-Away
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @02:05PM
Now we're starting to approach the correct headline!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:49AM
No, it's exactly like Earth. You see, we already warmed its climate even before getting there.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:19PM
Shhh... next, someone will notice that our Abercrombie Model breeding program was setup to make humans who can sustain the high gravity.
(Score: 1) by freetown on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:57AM
Correct, not at all like Earth. In fact, the mass, shape and size of a planet that can potentially support life like planet Earth are within rather strict parameters: see Life not possible on super Earths [abc.net.au]
In addition to the planetary parameters, there is also the matter of having an appropriate amount of energy as input into the planet's system. This does not include the fact that our planet Earth also has a nice and powerful magnetic shield which would probably be necessary too. Having a moon that creates a stable axis of rotation would be nice nevermind the tides and the tilt that allows for our various seasons.
Now if only they would keep their traps shut until they actually find a planet that meets all the criteria and stop making dumb attention grabbing press releases when they know that anything else will not support life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:40PM
On one hand, until we find at least one other biosphere, we don't really have a clue what the range of possible parameters for "life" are. I've recently been reading some SF from the '80s and '90s, and have been struck by the many assumptions about what a "typical" planetary system looks like (e.g. the nice sorting of terrestrial worlds in, gaseous worlds out) that seem dubious today, when we've found only a handful of exoplanets; there's a significant risk that any conclusions we draw about life generally from examining one biosphere, tailored for Earth specifically will be similarly off. So I have issues with statements like "when they know that anything else will not support life" (emphasis added).
On the other hand, you're right that there's much more hype than is warranted for each new "Earth-like" (i.e. almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Earth) planet discovered, especially since as said, we don't really have a clue about the parameters for life. Maybe biosystems inside gas giants are far more common than terrestrial ones, but our solar system is just unlucky enough not to have one; if we're not implicitly restricting the discussion to life much like we know it, why should an "Earth-like" planet receive more hype than a gas giant?
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:34PM
We should ask Iain M Banks, He'll know. Oh.. wait. :(
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:54PM
that seem dubious today, when we've found only a handful of exoplanets
Last I heard, we've discovered hundreds, and maybe up to a thousand exoplanets so far.
Of course, most of them are gas giants; we're only now discovering exoplanets that remotely resemble the Earth (not so large, rocky).
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:27PM
Well, in a literal sense, one exoplanet is far more than a handful. In the sense I meant, mere hundreds are a handful, compared to the whole population of our galaxy.
The point I was (apparently ineptly) trying to make, is that we didn't need to examine tens of thousands of planetary systems, or wait for the ability to survey down to, say, Mars-like planets/orbits, in order to find counterexamples to these "rules", they started popping up right away.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:52PM
Maybe, but something else to remember is that we don't really know what those other solar systems actually look like. Sure, we can see now that gas giants aren't always located far from their star, and instead are frequently somewhat close to it. However we still don't have a clear picture. In our own system, we know that we have 4 small rocky planets near the star, some scattered asteroids and a dwarf planet just beyond that, then 4 gas giants, then some more dwarf planets very, very far from the star. For other star systems, all we can see is the larger planets, so we really don't know where the small ones are, because they're too small for us to see. So, for instance, if some aliens with the exact same astronomical abilities as us are looking at our star system from 20ly away, they're going to see a star system with 4 gas giants, and that's it. They won't see that there's a 4 rocky planets, they won't see an asteroid belt, and they won't see the dozens of moons around the gas giants. They'll decide our system is not very interesting at the moment because it doesn't appear to have any rocky worlds at all, and they'll look at other systems instead until their capabilities improve and they revisit observations of this system, at which point they might be able to see Earth and Venus.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday July 04 2014, @06:47AM
we are working hard to make Earth more like it as we speak.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:22PM
Earth-like planet that is only 16 light years away
Well, I have nothing much on this afternoon, let's go for a trip.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @12:36PM
How long would it take, with current technology, to send an unmanned space probe to that planet?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:16PM
space is big. space is REALLY big....
(Score: 4, Informative) by LaminatorX on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:39PM
We more or less have the pieces for a space probe at the lab stage now: small nuclear reactors [nei.org], plasma rockets [wikipedia.org], and decision making AI [militaryaerospace.com]. We're within one Apollo-program style push of making a ship that could cross that distance in a century or two (depending on what values you assume for thrust efficiency vs weight of fuel), and start beaming signals back. The real engineering challenge at this point would be making the componentry sufficiently durable for such a trip.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DrMag on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:45PM
The speeds of the two Voyager spacecraft are roughly 57,500 km/h (35,700 mph) [nasa.gov]. Let's be generous and say that modern tech could up that to 100,000 km/h (that's 1e5 km/h). 16 light-years is about 1.5e14 km, so we're talking 1.5e9 hours, or more than 170,000 years, which is about as long as modern humans have existed [wikipedia.org]. Have a nice trip!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LaminatorX on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:47PM
Those speeds are were mostly built up with gravity slingshots as they whipped past the outer planets. A reactor-powered plasma rocket could thrust continuously for months or even years, the practical limit being how much reaction-mass (technically not fuel as such, but functionally equivalent) you can carry for the thruster. That could go much, much faster than the Voyagers.
(Score: 1) by bibendumsn on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:02PM
Too long.
This site, http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to-the-nearest-star// [universetoday.com], has an article from 2008 in response to a similar question... Somewhere between 81,000 and 19,000 years to travel just 4.3 light years.