Scientists find potentially habitable planet in nearby star
With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star's " habitable zone," where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface. The researchers found evidence of at least one and possibly two or three additional planets orbiting the star, which is about 22 light-years from Earth.
The team includes University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) astronomers Steven Vogt and Eugenio Rivera and was led by Guillem Anglada-Escud and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The host star is a member of a triple-star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, with a much lower abundance of elements heavier than helium, such as iron, carbon, and silicon. This discovery indicates that potentially habitable planets can occur in a greater variety of environment than previously believed.
The host star, called GJ 667C, is an M-class dwarf star. The other two stars in the triple-star system (GJ 667AB) are a pair of orange K dwarfs, with a concentration of heavy elements only 25 percent that of our Sun's. Such elements are the building blocks of terrestrial planets, so it was thought to be less likely for metal-depleted star systems to have an abundance of low-mass planets; Kazinform cites Xinhua.
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