A 200-Day Year Orbit Super-Earth Planet Could be Habitable

Scientists have discovered a new exoplanet that is orbiting a nearby star and could potentially be habitable.

The new planet (HD 40307g) is orbiting an orange star called HD 40307 that is located some 43 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. The parent star is slightly smaller than the sun.

Dubbed as super-Earth, the new planet is one of six planets orbiting the star. Three of the six planets have been newly discovered (which includes HD 40307g). The other three planets were discovered by astronomers in the year 2008. The mass of HD 40307g planet is seven times more than Earth's mass.

The three new planets were spotted when the research team was re-analyzing the observations of the star made by the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument, which is part of a telescope placed at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Except for the new planet, the other five planets have orbits that are too close to the parent star. They are likely to be too hot to hold liquid water. The new super-Earth is the outermost planet and orbits HD 40307 on a 200-day "year". The longer orbit could place the planet within HD 40307's "habitable zone," reported USA Today. The planet is said to be in the Goldilocks Zone where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.

"This is the closest one to Earth in a habitable zone that is not tidally locked," co-author of the study Hugh Jones, of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told Reuters.

"Just as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too cold but just right, this planet, or indeed any moons that it has, lie in an orbit comparable to Earth, increasing the probability of it being habitable," he said.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.