"Earth-like" Planet Unlikely To Exist

After an amazing announcement about the discovery of an earth-like planet, another group of scientists has raised some questions over the claim. The inhabitable planet, named Gliese 581 g, was discovered by Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Santa Cruz, Steven Vogt of the University of California and their fellow scientists.

They claimed that Gliese 581 g is located near the center of the habitable zone of its host star, where temperature is in the ideal range for the existence of liquid water.

Another group of astronomers, however, say that they have searched for the signs of Gliese 581 within their own data but couldn't find it.

"We easily recover the four previously announced planets, "b", "c", "d", and "e". However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days", said Francesco Pepe from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, according to New Scientist.

The two teams reached their conclusions using some of the similar data, which was gathered by HARPS, a device clamped on a 3.6-metre telescope at Chile's European Southern Observatory. HARPS, which is used to measure the starlight spectrum, searches for wobbles in the stars' movement that can be due to orbiting planets' gravitational tug.

Even though the Geneva scientists didn't find any proof of the existence of Gliese 581 g, they didn't rule out the possibility that the new planet exists. "We are not trying to prove the nonexistence of a planet. It’s really difficult to prove that something does not exist. We are just saying we do not see a significant signal that is really different from noise", Pepe said.