National Science Foundation and NASA
"New Planet Discovered 2010: Gliese 581g aka Goldilocks Planet – Among the planets in our solar system, our planet Earth is the only one which can sustain life. Scientists have been exploring the universe for quite some time now in search for another planet which can support life. One of the most studied planet is the red planet known as Mars because of the possible presence of water. However, based on further research, the lack of a magnetosphere and its extremely thin atmosphere pose great challenge to life’s sustainability.
A recent study conducted by a team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington led to the discovery of a new planet using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Accordingly, the new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581. Gliese 581 is located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra.
The new planet discovered is located in the Gliese 581 star system, in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” or an area where planets can can support liquid water on their surface. Hence the new planet discovered was named “Gliese 581g” or the “Goldilocks Planet”. Reportedly, this new planet has a mass of three to four times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days.
There’s one more interesting fact about this newly discovered planet called Gliese 581g. Since it is tidally locked to the Gliese 581 dwarf star, one side of the planet is always facing the star and is in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness."-dotsperiod.com
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"It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.
Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.
But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable."
"In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.
Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.
“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.
Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.
“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.
But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years."-NY Times.com
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