Earth-like planet finally found

The chances for the future generations to colonise the stars have just got higher. Today (Sept. 30, 2010) the astronomers announce the discovery of a planet just 20 light years away from the earth that has a similar atmosphere and gravity that which has 100% chance of like and may contain water. It is the most Earth-like planet ever found – a rocky world three times the size of our own.

This image concept shows the inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system and the host star, a red dwarf star only 20 light years away from Earth. The four tiny planets in the background are the planets that have already been discovered. The closer one, blue and green planet is 581G, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered.

The planet lies in a region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers – The Goldilocks Zone.

It took our scientist 11 years to find this Earth-like planet. The discovery comes three years after astronomers found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star –described by astronomers as being “in our backyard” in the Milky Way.

'If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby,' Dr Steven Vogt who led the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

'The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 per cent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.'

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