Habitable planet found orbiting nearby star

US: Astronomers say the nearest single Sun-like star to our solar system hosts five planets, including one perhaps capable of supporting life as we know it.

A new report says one of the alien planets circling the star Tau Ceti, which is less than 12 light-years from Earth, is in its “habitable zone,” a range of distances from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface.

“This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets,” study co-author Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. “They are everywhere, even right next door.”

The quintet includes planets between two and six times the Earth's mass. Researchers say the habitable one completes one lap around Tau Ceti every 168 days and is unlikely to be a rocky planet like Earth.

“It is impossible to tell the composition, but I do not consider this particular planet to be very likely to have a rocky surface,” said lead author Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, England. “It might be a ‘water world,’ but at the moment it's anybody's guess.”

Tuomi and his team re-analyzed 6,000 observations of Tau Ceti made by three different spectrographs, instruments that detect the tiny gravitational wobbles orbiting planets induce in their parent stars. The team could separate the five faint signals from the noise caused by stellar activity and other factors.

“We pioneered new data modeling techniques by adding artificial signals to the data and testing our recovery of the signals with a variety of different approaches,” Tuomi said in statement. “This significantly improved our noise modeling techniques and increased our ability to find low-mass planets.” Scientists hope that the new method helps the search for small planets and contribute to the discovery of more habitable ones throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

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