Distant planet could be candidate for life  Nov. 8, 2012 at 6:34
PM   |   0 comments  HATFIELD, England, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- European
astronomers say they've discovered a planet orbiting a nearby
sun at just the right distance for an Earth-like climate that
could support life.  The star, 44 light years away has three
planets, they said, and one of them is in the so-called
Goldilocks Zone, the limited band of distance from a sun where
temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water
to exist.  The team of German and British astronomers said the
planet is likely receiving about the same amount of solar energy
as Earth gets from our sun.  "The star HD 40307 is a perfectly
quiet old dwarf star, so there is no reason why such a planet
could not sustain an Earth-like climate," Guillem Angla-Escude
of Germany's University of Goettingen told Sky News.  Of the
more than 800 planets that have been discovered outside our
solar system since the early 1990s, only a handful are in their
star's habitable zone.  Fe