Posted on 04/27/2009 6:23:36 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Recent discoveries by planet-hunters have made astronomers more optimistic that the universe has plenty of rocky, Earth-like planets that occupy the "habitable zone" around stars.
Since the discovery in 1995 of the first "exoplanet," astronomers have found more than 300 such worlds, almost all of them Jupiter-size "gas giants," the easiest to detect with today's technology. There has been speculation that such giant planets may migrate closer to their parent stars and, en route, obliterate any smaller, Earth-like bodies.
But that seems a bit less likely with the announcement last week by Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor and colleagues of the discovery of two planets orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581, a relatively small, cool star about 20 light years from Earth. One of the planets, orbiting extremely close to the star, is 1.9 times the mass of Earth, the smallest "exoplanet" found to date. The other, about seven times the mass of Earth, is even more intriguing, for it is much farther from the star, at a distance that appears to place it in the theoretical habitable zone, where water might be able to remain liquid on the surface, as is the case with Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
As long as it doesn’t have electrical water and mole people.
or any cyborgs...
Unless they’re hot lonely cyborgs.
or any liberals
No. We won’t. We are alone.
How do you know that???
That’s what Adama said...
>How do you know that???
Look at the liberals on THIS planet.
QED.
Good luck with that search. Please don’t use any of my tax money chasing your tails over it.
Here's a hot number for you...
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Don’t hold your breath.
Intriguing indeed. Imagine a huge "ocean planet" and what might be living there. Wow! Staggers the imagination.
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