Yes, our own little third rock from the Sun is pretty super, but I’m talking about something else: astronomers have detected a transiting exoplanet ‘just’ 40 light years from us, whose density suggests that it is largely made up of water:
The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
“Astronomically speaking, this is on our block,” David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the study, told reporters this week. “This is a next-door neighbor. For perspective, our own TV signals have already passed beyond the distance of this star.”
The downside? The planet’s surface hits around 200 degrees C, leading Charbonneau to speculate that the newly-discovered planet was probably too hot to host life as we know it (Jim)…though “it didn’t miss it by very much.”
Centauri Dreams has more on the story.
