Canadian astronomer Philip Gregory has confirmed that there are three habitable zone planets revolve the blood-red dwarf star Gliese 667C. The wiz , which is part of a trinary star organization , is only 22 idle - years away and it features a planet that ’s only twice the mass of Earth — making it the crushed mass major planet find in a habitable zona thus far .
Top persona : creative person ’s impression of a sundown from the super - Earth Gliese 667Cc courtesy ESO / L. Calçada . The with child Sunday is the red gnome , 667C.
uranologist have known about the Gliese 667 organization for some time — include the fact that it feature some interesting exoplanets . But now , armed with Modern telescopic techniques , scientist have been able to study the triple star system in much greater detail .
Specifically , Gregory re - analyzed data acquired by the High Accuracy Radial speed Planet Searcher , HARPS , which is part of the European Southern Observatory ’s 3.6 metre scope in Chile . But this time he execute a Bayesian analytic thinking based on a fusion Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm — a system that allowed him to sample probability distributions .
look at the new results , he confirmed the presence of at least six planet , include the three potentially habitable ones .
Gliese 667 consists of three champion : two K midget which orb each other quite closely ( they ’re very like our own sun ) , and a low mass M midget , what ’s more normally referred to as a red dwarf .
It ’s this cherry-red nanus , 667C , that ’s causing all the excitement . Even though it ’s part of the treble system , it ’s at a fair length from the K dwarfs — about 200 AU ( Earth - distances ) . And while it ’s only one - third the size of our own sun and is only 1 % as promising , it hosts at least six planets — three of which seat comfortably within its habitable zone ( HZ ) .
Gregory , who make for out of the University of British Columbia ’s Physics and Astronomy Department , was able to confirm that the three planets spin around the crimson midget in 28 , 31 , and 39 days respectively . This indicates , quite obviously , that the planets are very close to the midget . But given its extremely low luminosity , the HZ reach is much closer for an M dwarf than for a Lord’s Day like ours .
Based onprevious studies , the satellite are likely super - Earths . But as Gregory ’s work now suggests , they are all open of fostering large amounts of liquid water and complex and unchanging atmospheres ( including crucial CO2 and O2 cycle ) .
Interestingly , there is a fourth planet deserving discussing , the 91.3 day 66Cf . It lie just tauntingly outside the border of the HZ , but its nonconcentric orbit means that it spends the majority of its time outside the so - yell Goldilocks Zone — that area of the solar arrangement that ’s just right for life to come forth and flourish .
But it ’s the 39 - day satellite that has caught Gregory ’s attention . It ’s a possible top-notch - Earth , like most terrestrial exoplanets that have been get a line so far — but it is now the tiniest of the super - Earths ever discovered , at around twice our satellite ’s mass . This could bode well for its potential habitableness .
The composition is still open for review , and was recently submit to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for consideration : “ Evidence for Multiple Planets in the inhabitable Zone of Gliese 667C : A Bayesian Re - analytic thinking of the HARPS data . ”
UPDATE # 1 : There are some questions about the scientific validity of this newspaper , and we are await an update from the authors .
UPDATE # 2 : To get further illumination on potential problems with the study , we spoke to Abel Méndez , an Associate Professor of Physics and Astrobiology in thePlanetary Habitability Laboratoryat the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo . He told us , “ the planets as described [ in the paper ] are dynamically unstable . Therefore , one or more of the proposed satellite does not survive or have unlike parameter . ”
Update # 3 : We also contacted Guilem Anglada - Escude , a postdoctoral investigator at the University of Goettingen in Germany . He told io9 that Gregory is not using all the available data , and that the organization he suggest is unstable . In gain , says Anglada - Escude , “ to promote signal to satellite candidate one needs to excrete astrophysical false positives ( not done ) and train that the organization is physically viable ( not done , not stable ) . ”
Based on what we ’re hearing from Anglada - Escude and Méndez , it ’s decipherable that Gregory will likely have to adapt his newspaper to answer these concerns . That ’s not to say he ’s incorrect — it ’s just that he ’ll have to resolve these crusade concerns .
Other generator and h / t : MIT Technology Review .
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