An international team of scientists working at European HARPS have announced the discovery of a large rocky planet residing within the stellar habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 163. That increases the number of known potentially habitable planets to six — the majority of which have been discovered in the past year.
To better understand the significance of the discovery, we contacted Abel Méndez, an Associate Professor of Physics and Astrobiology in the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Méndez told us that the detection of Earth-like worlds is pacing up — and that there's likely a lot more to come. "There are more observatories dedicated to these types of searches, "he told io9, "and many of them now have the required sensitivity to find these potentially habitable planets."
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