14 DAY TRIAL // Now that astronomers have found several hundred exoplanets, the focus has changed to finding planets that are similar to Earth, for obvious reasons, as their ultimate goal is to find extraterrestrial life.
The more a planet is like our own, the more likely it is to harbor life.
Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory are now convinced that Gliese 667, a relatively well studied star, has three planets in its habitable zone. Previous studies had found three exoplanets around the star, one in the habitable zone.
The ESO astronomers now believe there are up to seven planets there, three close enough to the star for liquid water to exist on the surface. All three are super Earths – they're more massive than our planet, but smaller than Uranus, for example.
"We knew that the star had three planets from previous studies, so we wanted to see whether there were any more," Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, who was part of the team that made the discoveries, said.
"By adding some new observations and revisiting existing data we were able to confirm these three and confidently reveal several more. Finding three low-mass planets in the star's habitable zone is very exciting!," he added.