There’s been some pretty big news of late in the science community.  Some  astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date. 

Using a the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile, they’ve discovered a world which could have running water on its surface.  Located about 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra, it orbits the faint star Gliese 581 and has a predicted that it’s radius is only 1.5 times that of the Earth.  What is most hopeful is that initial calculations and measurements have placed its mean surface temperature somewhere between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius.

Unfortunately due to its fair distance from us, I don’t think we’ll be traveling there any time soon, but it definitely provides us with focus with which to train new telescope technology!

What I find the most fascinating is the detection method, as they don’t actually just point the telescope at the planet and see it.  They can’t do this because current telescope technology isn’t good enough, especially when the object of interest is in the glare of a star.   So what they actually do is use a ridiculously sensitive instrument that measures the tiny changes in the velocity of a star as an orbiting planet pulls on it due to its gravitational field.  Call me crazy but that’s pretty damn cool! 

 Why is this planet important? Well, one of the major goals of science right now is to find out if life has arisen and evolved elsewhere in the Universe. Up until 1995 we weren’t even sure if any other stars had planets! Now we know of hundreds, and as the technology gets better, we can find smaller and smaller ones. We’re right on the verge of being able to find ones just like Earth. And while of course we cannot know if this newly found planet has life or not, it’s our best bet yet!

[To ready the articles I stole all this information from go here and here]