Es un poco temprano como para desvariar acerca de las implicaciones de este descubrimiento, pero no deja de ser sorprendente.
"An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet more than18 months ago, it has emerged.
Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, picked up the odd signal in December 2008.
A member of the Australian chapter of SETI, the organisation that looks for communication from distant planets, he had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an are of the galaxy that
The year before astronomers had announced that they had found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star 20 light years away.- Gliese 581. This planet was called Gliese 581e.
For months after his discovery he scanned the skies for a second signal to see whether it was just a glitch in his instrumentation but his search came to nothing.
The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.
And Dr Steven Vogt who led the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz, today said that he was '100 per cent sure ' that there was life on the planet.
The planet lies in the star's 'Goldilocks zone' - the region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers.
The planet also appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could well be capable of life.
Researchers say the findings suggest the universe is teeming with world like our own.
'If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby,'
'The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 per cent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.'
He told Discovery News: 'Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it'.
The planet is so far away, spaceships travelling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make the journey. If a rocket was one day able to travel at a tenth of the speed of light, it would take 200 years to make the journey.
Planets orbiting distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. Instead, astronomers look for tell-tale gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit.
The findings come from 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The planet orbits a small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra. The planet, named Glieseg, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away - so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.
It takes just 37 days to orbit its sun which means its seasons last for just a few days. One side of the planet always faces its star and basks in perpetual daylight, while the other is in perpetual darkness.
The most suitable place for life or future human colonists would be in the 'grey' zone - the band between darkness and light that circles the planet.
'Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,' said Dr Vogt who reports the find in the Astrophysical Journal.
If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. It's gravity is likely to be similar - allowing a human astronaut to walk on the surface upright without difficulty.
'This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever,' Vogt said.
GLIESE 581g FACT FILE
* Diameter - 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth.
* Mass - 3.1 and 4.3 times that of the Earth.
* Average surface temperature - between -24F and 10F (-31C and -12C)
* Distance from the Earth - 20 light years or 118,000,000,000,000 miles.
* Time needed to travel to Gliese 581g - 200 years.
* One of six planets to orbit the star Gliese 581.
* Length of year - 37 Earth days.
* Gravity - similar or slightly higher than Earth.
* Distance from its sun - around six million miles.
* The planet orbits a red dwarf which is 50 times cooler and a third the size of our Sun.
* Composition - rocky with liquid water and atmosphere."
de Daily Mail Online.
