A step closer to a second Earth?
NASA/Getty Images Astronomers may soon discover the ultimate answer to climate change. A NASA-funded team of astronomers in the United States has just discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star called 55 Cancri. So far, 55 Cancri boasts the most number of planets found in a single solar system outside our own. What’s got scientists ...
NASA/Getty Images
Astronomers may soon discover the ultimate answer to climate change. A NASA-funded team of astronomers in the United States has just discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star called 55 Cancri. So far, 55 Cancri boasts the most number of planets found in a single solar system outside our own. What’s got scientists excited, though, is that the planet falls into the “Goldilocks” category—meaning that the planet’s area of space is a “habitable zone” that is neither too hot nor too cold to support liquid water.
The newly discovered planet itself is not somewhere anyone would want to live. Dubbed “55 Cancri f,” it’s a giant ball of gas 45 times the mass of Earth, roughly like Saturn, and orbits 55 Cancri every 260 days. It’s really the neighborhood around 55 Cancri f that has astronomers so enthused, because many of them believe that liquid water could exist on the surface of undiscovered moons or rocky planets nearby. Debra Fischer, assistant professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, explains:
Right now, we are looking at a gap between the 260-day orbit of the new planet and the 14-year orbit of another gas giant, and if you had to bet, you’d bet that there is more orbiting stuff there.”
Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy believes that a rocky, Earth-like planet could be revealed in this space within five years. But don’t count on an Earth substitute any time soon—scientists still don’t have the technology to view small, potentially rocky planets within this Goldilocks zone just yet, let alone visit them. It so happens that 55 Cancri is 41 light years from Earth. That could pose a problem, since even distant Pluto is roughly 6 light years hours from the Sun, depending on where it is in its orbit.
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