Astronomers say they've found the first planet beyond our solar system that could have the right size and setting to sustain life as we know it, only 20 light-years from Earth.
"My own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told reporters today. "I have almost no doubt about it."
The discovery, published online in The Astrophysical Journal, is the result of 11 years of observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Astronomers participating in the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey detected the planet by tracking the faint gravitational wobbles it produced in its parent star. Now they say there may well be many more planets out there like this one.
"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common," Vogt said in a news release.
Better send out a few expeditions now.
The newfound planet, known as Gliese 581g, is estimated to be 3.1 to 4.3 times as massive as Earth, and makes a complete circuit around its sun in just under 37 days.
There's one way of extending the human life expectancy to about 800 years. Of course, we'd pretty much have to roll all our holidays into one and you'd be in school for about 200 years.
