The Exoplanetary Science at UNSW team have discovered the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away.

The planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around the red dwarf Wolf 1061.

The larger outer planet falls just outside the outer boundary of the habitable zone and is also likely to be rocky, while the smaller inner planet is too close to the star to be habitable.

The discovery is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The UNSW team made the discovery using observations of Wolf 1061 collected by the HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 metre telescope in La Silla in Chile.

An exception is Gliese 667Cc which lies 22 light years from Earth. It orbits a red dwarf star every 28 days and is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth.

More information and graphical material can be found at the UNSW Science Newsroom

The paper will soon be available on arxiv, and in the meantime can be found here.