According to Nature.com, a third planet has been discovered orbiting one of our closest stellar neighbors, Gliese 581. This third planet has some of the best prospects for being a potential carrier for liquid water — the main ingredient to life. Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star and is approximately 20 light years away from Earth. The new planet is said to be 5.5 times the size of earth and is potentially a rocky planet. The reason for the excitement among the astronomers is it has the most amount of positive aspects for possible life.

One major reason for this is its proximity from the parent star it orbits. It is closer to its star than Earth to our sun, but since the star is a red dwarf it is much cooler allowing it to be closer without getting too hot. The reason for the importance of the temperature is it needs to be within 0 to 100 degrees Celsius for liquid water to exist. If it is too hot or too cold it will not support life as we are familiar with on Earth. With their best estimations, it seems that the planet’s average temperature is between 0 to 40 degrees Celsius which is perfect for water to exist in its most precious form — liquid.

Of course all these measurements are very crude and could be off, but it is the best evidence yet that there may be other planets like our own. The last discovery of a planet like ours was 7.5 times the mass of our Earth, but too far from its star to be warm enough for liquid water. Its approximate temperature was similar to Pluto’s showing little to no evidence for any possible life to exist. But, these discoveries are showing fantastic signs for actually finding Earth-like planets that, before lately, were thought to be extremely rare. We have gone from having no planets to over 250 planets some even being rocky terrestrial planets like ours.

All we need to do now is find more rocky planets within the “Goldilocks Zone” where the planet is not too far and not too close to its parent star to achieve that perfect surface temperature. With red dwarfs showing that it can support terrestrial planets like the one just discovered, things are looking up for one of the greatest searches for humankind.