Outer Space Stuff

After observing Gliese 581 (a red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth) for more than a decade via Hawaii's Keck Observatory, a research team comprised of members from UC Santa Cruz and the Carnegie Institution of Washington have finally hit pay dirt. By using a technique called Doppler spectroscopy, the team has discovered a planet (GJ 581g) that is "squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of the star", a minimum of 3.1 times the mass of Earth and most likely rocky.

A somewhat awkward (albeit informative) press release can be seen here.

The immediate implications of this discovery are that potentially habitable planets (i.e., Earth-sized, rocky and orbiting within a star's habitable zone) are likely to be abundant throughout the universe. With extrasolar planet detection in its infancy, and with a relatively small sample already yielding a return, such an assumption seems sound.

At any rate, the Kepler Mission will soon give us an even better idea of how many potentially habitable planets might actually exist.