Thursday, May 26, 2011

First habitable planet?

Continuing in an astronomical theme - for the first time a planet has been identified (apart from Earth) which might well be habitable by known forms of life. According to a BBC article:

"This discovery is important because it's the first time climate modellers have proved that the planet is potentially habitable, and all observers agree that the exoplanet exists," he told news agency PA.

"The Gliese system is particularly exciting to us as it's very close to Earth, relatively speaking. So with future generations of telescopes, we'll be able to search for life on Gliese 581d directly."

And another interesting development of the detection of planets wandering between the stars. They were found by Japanese researchers says a BBC report:

They detected evidence of 10 Jupiter-sized objects with no parent star found within 10 Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is equivalent to the distance between our Earth and Sun. Further analysis led them to the conclusion that most of these objects did not have parent stars.

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