The discovery of a possible "super-Earth" less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a "super-Earth" as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as the Earth and likely to be rocky planet.
"We look for these types of planets because they are our best chance at finding life elsewhere," said Suvrath Mahadevan, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy at Penn State and co-author on a paper about the discovery published today (Oct. 23) in The Astronomical Journal. "The exoplanet is in the habitable or the 'Goldilocks Zone,' the right distance from its star that liquid water could exist on its surface, if it has the right atmosphere."
For decades, the search for planets that might host liquid water, and perhaps life, has driven astronomers to design and construct advanced telescopes and computational models capable of detecting even the faintest signals from starlight. This latest discovery was the result of two decades of observational data and offers one of the most promising prospects yet for searching for signs of life on other planets, Mahadevan said.
The exoplanet was found using data from the Habitable-Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a high-precision, near-infrared spectrograph - a complex prism that breaks apart signals from starlight - fixed to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Penn State researchers led the design and construction of the HPF, built to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars.
"We call it the Habitable Zone Planet Finder, because we are looking for worlds that are at the right distance from their star that liquid water could exist on their surface. This has been the central goal of that survey," Mahadevan said. "This discovery represents one of the best candidates in the search for atmospheric signature of life elsewhere in the next five to ten years."
