Up to three planets - potentially rocky like Earth - have been spotted around a star located relatively near our solar system - a planetary system offering astronomers intriguing possibilities in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.
The planets orbit Gliese 887, a so-called red dwarf star half the sun’s mass located 11 light years from Earth - right in our backyard in cosmic terms, researchers said on Friday. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles .Two planets have been definitively identified, one orbiting Gliese 887 every nine days and the other every 21 days.
“They are ‘super-Earth’ planets, which means that they are a few times the mass of the Earth and are expected to have a solid core like the Earth, as opposed to the big gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn,” said astronomer Sandra Jeffers of the University of Göttingen in Germany, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Science.
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