"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.
The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.
Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.
"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.
I've seen this movie. 120 years from now the first colony ship that heads there gets eaten/assimilated/copied/lost in time/zombified/mindwiped/sacrificed to very old, very dark gods, and we have to nuke the place from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure. Look at the kinds of monsters growing on this planet we're all on now.
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3 comments:
Jesus, that's dumb, Z.
The Gliesean invasion armada is already on route to Earth. That's why the UN just appointed their "Alien Liason" - in actuality, the One-World-Government Alien Occupation Surrender Coordinator! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!1
Actually, this is such cool news. We've got to put an orbital telescope on Planet G, like, yesterday.
It is excellently cool, I'm just waiting for the part of the report that says "And we all die because the of the flesh-eating grass".
Or, "And we all die because of the sentient viruses."
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