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Astronomers using ESO’s leading exoplanet hunter HARPS

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have today announced more than fifty newly discovered planets around other stars.

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Among these are many rocky planets not much heavier than the Earth.

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One of them in particular orbits within the habitable zone around its star.

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This is the ESOcast!

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Cutting-edge science and life behind the scenes of ESO,

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the European Southern Observatory.

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In this episode of the ESOcast,

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we take a close look at another major exoplanet discovery

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from ESO’s La Silla Observatory, 

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made thanks to its world-beating planet hunting machine HARPS.

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Among the new planets just announced by scientists,

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sixteen are super-Earths — rocky planets up to ten times as massive as Earth.

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This is the largest number of such planets ever announced at one time.

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A planet in orbit causes its star to regularly move backwards and forwards

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as seen from Earth.

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This creates a tiny shift of the star’s spectrum

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that can be measured with an extremely sensitive spectrograph

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such as HARPS.

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In their quest to find a rocky planet that could harbour life,

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astronomers are now pushing HARPS even further.

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They have selected ten well-studied nearby stars similar to our Sun.

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Earlier observations showed that these were ideal stars to examine

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for even less massive planets.

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After two years of work,

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the team has found five light super-Earths around three of the stars.

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These planets are very good candidates for future observations

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looking for evidence of life.

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One of the newly found planets, named HD 85512 b,

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orbits inside the habitable zone.

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This is the narrow area around a star where water can exist in liquid form.

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Astronomers estimate that liquid water

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could possibly be present on this planet

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if it is a rocky world that has more than 50% cloud cover.

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By looking carefully at the results from the first eight years of HARPS observations,

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the team has found that around 40% of stars similar to the Sun

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harbour at least one planet lighter than Saturn.

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These new results lead astronomers to believe

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that they could soon find more super-Earths

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in the habitable zones of their stars with HARPS.

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These planets will be great targets for powerful future telescopes

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to try to study their atmospheres looking for evidence of life.

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Thanks to HARPS, the search for another Earth elsewhere in the galaxy

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is picking up pace!

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ESOcast is produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory.

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ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy,

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designing, constructing and operating the world’s most advanced ground-based telescopes.

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Transcription by ESO ; translation by —

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Now that you've caught up with ESO,

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head 'out of this world' with Hubble.

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The Hubblecast highlights the latest discoveries of the world´s most recognized and prized space observatory,

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the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope