Researchers have spotted up to three super-Earth planets around a star located relatively near our solar system.

Super-Earths are planets which have a mass higher than the Earth’s but substantially below those of our local ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.

The planets orbit Gliese 887, a so-called red dwarf star half the Sun’s mass located 11 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Only 12 other stars are closer to our solar system.

How were the planets identified?

A team from the University of Göttingen monitored the red dwarf, using the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

They used a technique known as “Doppler wobble”, which enables them to measure the tiny back and forth wobbles of the star caused by the gravitational pull of the planets.

Two planets have been definitively identified, one orbiting Gliese 887 every nine days and the other every 21 days. One of these two is situated just inside what is called the habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone, around the star, perhaps able to maintain liquid water on the surface and harbor life.

A habitable zone, also called the ‘Goldilocks zone’, is the area around a star where it is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of surrounding planets.

A third potential planet orbiting every 50 days is located in the habitable zone, but still needs further confirmation.

“The newly detected planets are the best possibilities of all the known planets in close proximity to the Sun to see if they have atmospheres and to study these atmospheres in detail,” said astronomer Sandra Jeffers of the University of Göttingen in Germany, lead author of the research published in the journal Science.

Other interesting findings

The researchers discovered two more interesting facts about Gliese 887. 

The first is that the red dwarf has very few starspots, unlike the Sun. If Gliese 887 was as active as our Sun, it is likely that a strong stellar wind – outflowing material which can erode a planet’s atmosphere – would simply sweep away the planets’ atmospheres. 

This means that the newly discovered planets may retain their atmospheres, or have thicker atmospheres than the Earth, and potentially host life, even though one planet receives more light than the Earth. 

The other interesting feature is that the brightness of Gliese 887 is almost constant. Therefore, it will be relatively easy to detect the atmospheres of the super-Earth system, making it a prime target for the James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to the Hubble Telescope.

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