It was always one of my internalized fears that we would find a planet just like Earth. On one hand it would be interesting to explore it, see what was evolving and really answer the question “are we alone?” But on the other hand you know that it would be the inherent human instinct to go to it and exploit the discovery and eventually ruin the new Earth as well. I remember watching the movie Titan AE and the end scene is so beautiful as the “camera” scans over Bob, the new planet Earth, but in my head I was thinking “They’ll just screw it up like we’ve done to this one.”

Well, a planet has been discovered with the Chile-based European Southern Observatory High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher instrument - much like the one that we’re one right now. It is the first Earth-sized planet - the smallest outside of our solar system ever discovered and is at a distance to a mother star, Gliese 581, that it would be suitable for life at a temperature of 0 - 104 Fahrenheit, and also has good prospects for liquid water. As we know from looking at the evolution of our own Earth, water is indeed a key ingredient for the evolution of life making it a key destination for the on going search for other life forms.

However exploration isn’t going to be such an easy activity. Astronomers and scientists have yet to develop instruments that are sensitive enough to do any sort of real exploration.

The plant found in Libra is about 50% larger than Earth circling Gliese 581 and travels at a vacuum of about 187 000 miles per second. This isn’t the first world that has been found circling Gliese, two others have been found previously. One the size of Neptune and the other about eight times the size of Earth. Gliese is smaller and colder than our sun thus the new planet is 14 times closer to Gliese than our Earth to the Sun.

The new planet so eloquently goes by the name 581 c. And if you weigh 150 lbs here on earth, you’ll feel like you’re 240 lbs on 581 c as gravity is 1.6 times stronger than the gravity here on Earth. It also orbits it’s mother star every 13 days. So you’d be fatter and “older” as your birthday’s racked up rather quickly.

But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it’s likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn’t rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Distance is another problem. “We don’t know how to get to those places in a human lifetime,” Maran said.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.

Phewph. Well 581 c, you’re safe for now… Until we figure out how to travel at the speed of light without killing ourselves.