Illustration courtesy L. Calçada, ESO Published August 30, 2011
The unpoetically named HD85512b was discovered orbiting an
orange dwarf star in the constellation Vela. Astronomers found
the planet using the European Southern Observatory's High
Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, instrument
in Chile. Radial velocity is a planet-hunting technique that
looks for wobbles in a star's light, which can indicate the
gravitational tugs of orbiting worlds. The HARPS data show that
the planet is 3.6 times the mass of Earth, and the new world
orbits its parent star at just the right distance for water to
be liquid on the planet's surface—a trait scientists believe is
crucial for life as we know it. "The distance is exactly the
limit where you want to be to have liquid water," said study
leader Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. "If you
scale it to our system, it's a bit further out than Venus is to
our sun." At that distance, the