Scientists have just discovered another exoplanet, and this one has them quite excited. Gliese 832c dwells within the habitable zone of a red dwarf star just 16 light years away from our own.
Abel Mendez Torres, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Pueto Rico at Arecibo said, “The Earth Similarity Index (ESI) of Gliese 832c (ESI=0.81) is comparable to Gliese 667Cc with an ESI of 0,84, and Kepler-62e, at 0.83. This makes Gliese 832c one of the top three most Earthlike planets according to the ESI, and the closet one to the Earth of all three–a prime object for follow-up observations.”
The other two planets, Gliese 667Cc and Kepler 62e, are 22 light years and 1200 light years respectively. The make-up of these worlds is unknown, but given their distances from their stars, the terrestrial nature of their landscapes, and the ability to pool liquid water on their surface, each of the three worlds are well worth examining further.
There’s a bit of a larger list on offer if you go to this webpage, which discusses 10 potentially habitable worlds, not all of which are confirmed, but all very promising for scientists eager to locate potential life forms or places we might be able to colonize someday.
For people who are curious, I just found this great pdf file explaining what makes a world habitable, and it includes the possibility of habitable moons.
In brief, the habitable zone is the area surrounding a star in which an orbiting planet would receive the right amount of energy, light, heat and gravitational pull to maintain liquid water and an atmosphere guaranteed to keep that water from evaporating away. It also requires that the right materials be present for a life form to grow–the primordial soup, if you will.
The theory of primordial soup is, of course, unproven, and many scientists do not believe that the ocean was once much thicker and contained the ingredients for life, yet still the idea is taught in schools today.
If indeed any of the habitable exoplanets possessed such a soup, or any other material means to create life, it’s likely that the process would have already begun. Life’s ingredients would not lie about in dormancy for millenia without taking some definitive action.
