{"id":10035,"date":"2013-06-25T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T22:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=10035"},"modified":"2013-06-25T15:03:42","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T01:03:42","slug":"scientists-discover-system-with-three-planets-in-habitable-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=10035","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover System with Three Planets in Habitable Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

W. M. Keck Observatory press release<\/a>…<\/p>\n

A team of scientists recently confirmed six, and possibly seven, planets orbiting a star system a mere 22 light-years from Earth. More importantly, three of those planets are super-Earths, lying in the Goldilocks Zone where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully-packed habitable zone. The findings will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on June 26.<\/p>\n

Previous studies of the triple star system called Gliese 667C showed the star hosts three planets with one of them in the habitable zone. Now, a team of astronomers has reexamined the system by re-mining existing European Southern Observatory\u2019s HARPS data and combining it with data collected from the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Magellan Telescope to find evidence for up to seven planets around the star. These planets orbit the third faintest star of a triple star system. The two other suns would look like a pair of very bright stars visible in the daytime and at night they would provide as much illumination as the full Moon.
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\"Gliese<\/a>
An animation of the Three of the planets around Gliese 667C orbit within its habitable zone (in green). Credit: Guillem Anglada-Escude<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/h6>\n

While the HARPS data has been available since 2006, the team re-examined the data using a set of algorithms called HARPS-TERRA developed by the paper\u2019s lead-author Guillem Anglada-Escud\u00e9 of the University of G\u00f6ttingen, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute for Science.<\/p>\n

Those new findings were then combined with more than 12 years of data collected on the world\u2019s largest telescope, Keck I, fitted with the successful planet-hunting instrument, HIRES.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started observing GJ 667C from Keck Observatory way back in 2000, six years before the Swiss HARPS team started observing it,\u201d said University of California Santa Cruz astronomer and team member, Steve Vogt. \u201cAnd though the HARPS team was able to hit the star with much higher cadence over the past 6 years, our early observations more than doubled the overall time base of the data set, enabling much stronger constraints to be placed on the planet solutions.\u201d Vogt\u2019s work at the Keck Observatory was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). <\/p>\n

\u201cThese new results highlight how valuable it can be to re-analyze data in this way and combine results from different teams on different telescopes,\u201d Anglada-Escud\u00e9 said.<\/p>\n

Three of these planets are confirmed to be super-Earths \u2014 planets more massive than Earth, but less massive than planets like Uranus or Neptune \u2014 that are within their star\u2019s habitable zone, a thin shell around a star in which water may be present in liquid form if conditions are right. This is the first time that three such planets have been spotted orbiting in this zone in the same system.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The NASA Kepler mission has revealed that dynamically compact systems are common
around sun-like stars (e.g., Kepler 11 in the central panel). Credit: Guillem Anglada-Escude<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/h6>\n

\u201cWe knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more,\u201d said Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, who also led the team. \u201cBy adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star\u2019s habitable zone is very exciting!\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-author Rory Barnes of the University of Washington noted the discovery suggests habitable planets may be more numerous than previously thought. \u201cThe number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star. Instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and have a high chance of finding several of them,\u201d Barnes said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery is really the start of a whole new era studying Earth-like planets which may have liquid water on the surface,\u201d said Maria Womack, National Science Foundation program officer. \u201cThis is a result of more than a decade of hard work using the best tools to do cutting-edge science \u2014 just the kind of research NSF loves to be a part of.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study used measurements from the HARPS spectrograph (European Southern Observatory, Chile), Keck I-HIRES (W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA), and the PFS (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

W. M. Keck Observatory press release… A team of scientists recently confirmed six, and possibly seven, planets orbiting a star system a mere 22 light-years from Earth. More importantly, three of those planets are super-Earths, lying in the Goldilocks Zone where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This … Continue reading “Scientists Discover System with Three Planets in Habitable Zone”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[56,1216,805,50],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10035"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10049,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions\/10049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}