New Planets Discovered; Three Potentially Are Habitable

22 light years away

Astronomers discovered a solar system packed with planets three of which are habitable -- meaning in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life.

The Gliese 667C star is orbited between five and seven planets and is part of a triple star system known as Gliese 667.

"We identified three strong signals in the star before, but it was possible that smaller planets were hidden in the data," said Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen in Germany, who led the study. "We reexamined the existing data, added some new observations, and applied two different data analysis methods especially designed to deal with multi-planet signal detection."