Super Earth: New Planet GJ 667Cc in 'Habitable Zone'

by NowPublic Staff | February 2, 2012 at 11:17 am

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GJ 667Cc: New Planet Discovered that Could Support Liquid Water

Meet GJ 667Cc, described as a "super Earth" that could conceivably support human life. GJ 667Cc is relatively close to Earth. Note that we said Relatively": it's 22 light-years (129,329,758,210,039 miles) away.

The newly-discovered super-Earth orbits around GJ 667C, a dwarf star: the planet, which is 4.5 times the size of Earth, has a "year" that's only 28 days long.

Oh, and GJ 667C is part of a three-star system, so, if you stood on GJ 667Cc and looked up, you'd have something akin to a Luke Skywalker experience.

"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone — there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

The "Habitable Zone" speaks only to the potential to support liquid water on the planet's surface. The chemical makeup of the GJ 667C system is radically different than that of our own solar system.

GJ 667C has another super-Earth in its thrall, but don't book tickets on Virgin Galactic quite yet: GJ 667Cb is basically a planet-sized lump of glowing charcoal, orbiting its sun once a week.