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Tau Ceti: Sun-like star only twelve light years away may have a habitable planet - 0 views

phys.org/...ceti-sun-like-star-twelve.html

scibyte76 HabitablePlanet

shared by Mars Base on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may host five planets, including one in the star's habitable zone
  • twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun
  • five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected.
  • One of the planets lies in the star's habitable zone
  • and has a mass around five times that of Earth
  • making
  • the smallest planet found to be orbiting in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star
  • The international team of astronomers
  • combined more than six-thousand observations from three different instruments and intensively modeled the data
  • Using new techniques, the team has found a method to detect signals half the size previously thought possible
  • We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days
  • researchers chose Tau Ceti for this noise-modeling study because they had thought it contained no signals
  • As it is so bright and similar to our Sun, it is an ideal benchmark system to test out our methods for the detection of small planets
  • Tau Ceti is one of our nearest cosmic neighbors and so bright that we may be able to study the atmospheres of these planets
  • researchers discovered this planetary system using data from three state-of-the-art spectrographs
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