Friday, October 1, 2010

Habitable Planet Found

Well, they have finally found a habitable planet! I don't know about you, but I find that news extremely interesting.
"After years of saying habitable exoplanets are just around the corner, planet hunters have finally found one. Gliese 581g is the first planet found to lie squarely in its star’s habitable zone, where the conditions are right for liquid water.

“The threshold has now been crossed,” said astronomer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the planet’s discoverers, in a press briefing Sept. 29. “The data says this planet is at the right distance for liquid water, and the right mass to hold on to a substantial atmosphere.”
The discovery is both “incremental and monumental,” comments exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT, who was not involved in the new study. When a recent study predicted the first habitable world should show up by next May, Seager rightly said the real answer was more like “any day now.”
“We’ve found smaller and smaller planets that got closer and closer to the habitable zone,” she said. “But this is the first that’s in the habitable zone.”
"
You can read the rest of the article over here
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/real-habitable-exoplanet/

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can almost hear the conversation......"oh well, we've rubbished this one - time to move on...." :(

Cathode said...

Yeah, but it is kind of nice to think that there might be a back up planet for the rich people to escape to, lol.

We couldn't send just greenies there because imagine how much all the carbon trading they would have to do to offset those emissions, ~chuckle~