Possible 'Goldilocks Zone' planet found

Last updated 13:52 17/10/2012

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It is the type of planet they've been searching for across the Milky Way galaxy and they found it circling a star right next door - 40 trillion kilometres away.


Life cannot survive the 1200 degree Celsius heat of the planet, so close to its star that it circles it every few days.


And those planets might fit the not-too-hot, not-too-cold description sometimes called the ‘Goldilocks Zone’.




But the wow factor of finding such a planet so close has some astronomers already talking about how to speed up a 40 trillion kilometre rocket trip there.

Scientists have already started pressuring Nasa and the European Space Agency to come up with missions to send something out that way to get a look at least.

The research was released online Tuesday in the journal Nature.

There has been a European-US competition to find the nearest and most Earthlike exoplanets - planets outside our solar system.




This planet has the smallest mass - a measurement of weight that doesn't include gravity - that has been found outside our solar system so far.




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"This is an historic discovery," he wrote in an email.





Alpha Centauri was the first place the private Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence programme looked in its decade-long hunt for radio signals that signify alien intelligent life.

Nothing was found, but that doesn't mean nothing is there, said SETI  astronomer Seth Shostak.



Part of the problem is that the star is so close and so bright - though not as bright as the Sun - that it made it harder to look for planets, said study lead author Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory.


But other astronomers said they had no doubt and Udry said the team calculated that there was only a one-in-1000 chance that they were wrong about the planet and that something else was causing the signal they saw.






But the rocks would be "more like lava, like a lava planet".


- AP

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