3 Earth-like planets in our neighborhood

[TomK]

This is making news internationally. Three potentially Earth-like planets have been discovered orbiting an ultracool cool dwarf star in the solar neighborhood. Admittedly the system is 40 light years away with a solar system quite different to ours, but it's a significant discovery.

The observations were taken by a few different telescopes around the World, but UKIRT on Mauna Kea had a significant role.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/02/health/thr...index.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vao...17448.html

[VancouverIslander]

This is very cool. It reminds me of one of my favourite Heinlein novels from when I was a kid - "Time for the Stars". Now where are all the telepathic twins?

Just call me Mike

[TomK]

A couple of links which might be of interest to some.

NASA article:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/promising-wo...dwarf-star

ESO podcast with some background info:
https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1615a/