Another Earth? 'Habitable' Planet Discovered 22 Light Years Away

Is intelligent life out there? It's a question that has plagued us for millenia. As astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains to NOVA: "The discovery of life somewhere other than on Earth...is an unimpeachable first goal in our exploration of the cosmos."

Our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets.

Though alien life is still the stuff of science fiction, astronomers may be inching closer. This week, researchers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letter that they had discovered a rocky planet orbiting a red sun very similar to our own, just 22 light years away.

“This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer on the team said in a press release. “The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets.”

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The newly discovered planet, mellifluously named GJ667Cc, is about 4.5 times the mass of Earth and receives about 90 percent of our light, mostly infrared rays. Because of its size, gravity is many times stronger, and any life forms would have had to evolve ways of seeing within the infrared spectrum (like rattlesnakes do here on Earth). Most exciting is where it's located: the so-called "Goldilocks Zone", a not-too-hot, not-too-cold region away from the sun. It's such prime real estate that head researcher Guillem Anglada-Escude is declaring it  "the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it" to ABC News.

"Other proposed candidates [to be watery worlds] would require very special conditions to support liquid water," he said.

The search for habitable planets within our galaxy has accelerated in recent years. Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet in 1992, scientists have honed in on 755 such planets, 99 of which are situated within a multiple planetary system like our own. According to some estimates, each star in Milky Way has an average of 1.6 planets, and given the billions of stars in our galaxy, it seems probable that at least a few are harboring alien life.

Getting there is the problem. The fastest man-made object in space, Helios, traveled 70 km per second, or the equivalent of flying from NY to LA in less than a minute. At those speeds, reaching GJ667Cc would take a glacial 585,847 years.

So even if intelligent life is out there, it's unlikely we'll be encountering it any time soon. Unless they visit us here, which, if they're technologically advanced to travel such distances, we probably don't even want. Said Stephen Hawking in his 2010 documentary series Into the Universe: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships...having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."