SYFYAlien Hunters Find a Super-Earth in the Habitable Zone, Just 20 Light-Years AwayCassidy Ward
Fri, October 24, 2025 at 2:59 PM EDT
5 min read
HPFFinding life elsewhere in the cosmos is no easy task.
We’ve been searching for decades and, so far, we haven’t heard from anyone and we haven’t found anywhere that looks quite like home. While astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 6,000 exoplanets and counting, our ability to study those worlds in depth is limited.
Often, we can figure out bits and pieces of information, but we don’t really know what it’s like to be there. Now, astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable world less than 20 light-years from here, which could be photographed directly using the next generation of telescopes.
If alien life exists on the newly discovered JG 251 c, we could know about it in the next 10 years.
A potentially habitable super-Earth less than 20 light-years awayThe nearby exoplanet also known as Gliese 251 c was found using data from the Habitable-Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a high-precision, near-infrared spectrograph attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory. That instrument is specifically designed to look for planets in the habitable zone of their parent star. Also known as the Goldilocks Zone, this is the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, provided it has the right atmosphere.
The planet’s signal was later confirmed with the NEID spectrometer at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the results were
published in The Astronomical Journal.
Astronomers already knew about a closer planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 251. Discovered in 2020, Gliese 251 b is a rocky world which orbits every 14 days, much too close to sustain life as we know it.
Scientists combined historical observations of the system with new data from HPB to validate and improve data on Gliese 251 b. In the process, they stumbled onto another planet orbiting farther out, with an orbital period of about 54 days.
Both planets orbit much closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun, but because it’s a cooler dwarf star, its habitable zone is closer. The newly discovered Gliese 251 c sits smack in the middle of that zone.
"We look for these types of planets because they are our best chance at finding life elsewhere,” co-author and Penn State Professor of Astronomy Suvrath Mahadevan said in a statement Oct. 23. "The exoplanet is in the habitable or the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the right distance from its star that liquid water could exist on its surface, if it has the right atmosphere."
Searching for life on Giese 251 c with future telescopes
TmtAstronomers find new exoplanets all the time. There are new exoplanets being confirmed and new candidate planets being discovered practically every day, but this one is special.
Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of star in the cosmos, making up roughly 75 percent of the stellar population. They have relatively low masses which, counterintuitively, means they live much longer. While more massive stars like blue supergiants have way more fuel, they burn through that fuel much faster. The largest stars in the universe have lives measuring hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Meanwhile, red dwarf stars can persist for hundreds of billions or trillions of years. That means that a potentially habitable planet would have plenty of time for life to grab a foothold.
Because it’s nearby, Gliese 251 c is a perfect candidate for direct observation, allowing astronomers to retrieve details about the planet’s atmosphere and surface conditions. Usually, to get that sort of information we have to get lucky.
When an exoplanet moves in front of its parent stars from our point of view, we can get some information about its atmosphere. As starlight passes through the atmosphere it gets scattered and changed. That’s why the sky is blue, why sunsets are so pretty, and why astronomers can read the atmospheric signatures of distant alien worlds in starlight. The trouble is that most exoplanets don’t transit in front of their stars. If we want to study exoplanets in detail, direct observation might be our best bet.
While we can’t directly observe Gliese 251 c with existing instruments, Mahadevan explained that upcoming instruments like the Planetary Sciences Imager (PSI) on the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will be able to characterize its atmosphere, potentially returning signals of oxygen, liquid water, or other signs of habitability.
“While we can’t yet confirm the presence of an atmosphere or life on GJ 251 c, the planet represents a promising target for future exploration,” Mahadevan said. “We made an exciting discovery, but there's still much more to learn about this planet.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/alien-hunters-super-earth-habitable-185958839.html
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