Astronomers announced that they had discovered the nearest potentially habitable planet outside our solar system.
The newfound exoplanet — a so-called super-Earth named GJ 357 d — lies 31 light-years away from our solar system. It’s about six times bigger than our planet and orbits in its host star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form on the surface.
There’s no evidence at this point that life exists on the exoplanet, only that conditions there could support life as we know it.
The findings, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, were presented Wednesday at an exoplanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lisa Kaltenegger, an associate professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the international team of astronomers who found the intriguing exoplanet, said the discovery was totally unexpected.
Little is known about the potentially habitable planet, which takes almost 56 days to orbit its host star at a distance roughly one-fifth of the distance between Earth and the sun. Kaltenegger said a pair of next-generation telescopes — the James Webb Space Telescope that is scheduled to launch in 2021 and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile that is expected to begin operating in 2025 — should reveal more, including whether the planet is rocky or has oceans.
