did anyone know this before...???

Yep the talk on this site has been of nothing else. You can read about it from the link below, which suggests there may be a third planet orbiting the same star as well (we found a first one in 2005)

Although we now know of about 230 planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way they have to date nearly all been gas giants similar to Jupiter, the excitement is that this one is a terrestrial planet like Earth with a temperature range at which water would be liquid not ice,

As some people are already fantasising about colonising this planet, I would say this to them ... The problem is getting there with enough water food and oxygen in a ship that could carry a sustainable colony, A wide variety of skills would be needed and enough variety in their gene pool such that the colonists would avoid the perils of inbreeding that have beset the royal families of Europe for generations.

A 3-man mission like the Apollo missions is not an option, especially as such a crew could not even breed!

1: They THINK the temperature may be similar to earth's.

2: No way we can know if there is any life on it

3: It orbits a red dwarf star and is likely closer to that star than the earth to the sun (in order to be a similar temperature to earth), so tidal friction with the star would force that planet to always face one way to its star, meaning no day and night.

4: It would take 20 years to get there if we could travel at the speed of light - which we can't, not even 1% of that speed. So it would really take us a thousand years or more to get there.

5: You should do a little more reading when you see things like this. Anyone can write an article about something they heard and not have any real facts or understanding of physics, astronomy, or even simple chemistry - you can't just read one little blurb on the internet somewhere and expect to get even part of the story.

6: There have been over 200 planets found around other stars, there are bound to be thousands more we haven't found yet.

The planet is 20 light years away. That means a radio signal sent from that planet to ours would take 20 years just to get here. Man cannot travel even close to this speed yet so we will probably never get there in our life times. However science has observed that information can be transferred instantly between entangled photons so we know it will some day be possible for us to travel from place to place instantly as well but that will be hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. In the next few years new telescopes will be put into space that can look at planets like this and look at the gasses in their atmospheres and based on that make some educated guesses as to if life exists on the planet.

The new planet is unlikely to support life like we know it because it orbits a red (cool type star) dwarf. What is important is, our solar system is not the only one to make planets in the size range of Earth, Venus and Mars.

Venus is too hot because it lies outside "the habitable band" for our sun. When you are too close, water is never a liquid. Too far out, water is always frozen.

The bad luck for the new planet is it orbits a small red star where the habitable band is very narrow. Some of these smaller stars have a band would be narrower than a planet is wide. One side would always be baked and the other side would always be frozen.

But, we will keep sweeping for new planets. It won't be long before we find one like earth around a star like our sun.

Jamey

There is absolutely no way we will know that there is actually life on the new found planet. It is simply in the zone of its star (sun) where it could have conditions favourable to life.

Also, it takes light 20 years to reach it. For us currently it would take hundreds of thousands of years with the best space vehicles we have, and then only unmanned probes.

And yes, there will be many more planets found circling stars. It is new science. Nobody can see these planets. The stars are too far away. The planets are discovered by other means (their effect on the parent star).

yea, i read that yesterday, it has the 5times the gravity of earth! I think it would be really cool to see real aliens, but know humans, we would probably kill them all and take over the planet! we are every ignorant when it comes to stuff like that! we shoot first and then ask the questions... so thinking about that, no i hope we don't find aliens...

And actually i dont want to think about what we are going to do to the universe once we find a way to travel faster in space. colonizing and all that stuff, just because we killed our earth doesn't mean we have the right to do it on other planets!!

thats 20 years at the speed of light but that is outside the ship inside it will be a lot less as time dilation is greater the nearer we get to the speed of light. But of course if we could jump into Hyper space or use a wormhole then things would b much quicker. I should think there will be more planets but wouldn't it be cool if we are the first civilisation to have evolved in the universe

You need 20 years to get there if you're travelling at the speed of light. And no vehicle can travel that fast making it impossible to reach that place.

Absolutely there are more planets yet to be discovered, let's just wait and see.

this is a bit exaggerating but it must've been a thousand questions like this and i haven't been logged on too long past couple of days.

not all scientists are as excited as the others. if there were aliens, the news would probably clog the entire internet.