BBC Focus Magazine

[Shadowwolf]

An international team of scientists led by Carnegie's Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

Their work will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team used public data from the European Southern Observatory and analyzed it with a novel data analysis method. They also incorporated new measurements from the Keck Observatory's High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120202151434.htm

[M Paul Lloyd]

Mmmmmm. but, does it have (or indeed need) a magnetic field?