OGDEN — Weber State University research that concluded a life-sustaining planet might be circling a star 20 light years from Earth has been boosted by the National Science Foundation, which says it found a planet orbiting a red dwarf star that "may be the first truly habitable exoplanet."
The science foundation said 11 years of research shows that one of several planets in the Gliese 581 system is ideally situated in the star's "habitable zone."
The news got back to John Armstrong, an assistant physics professor at Weber State, and a former graduate student of his, Rhett Zollinger, who published a paper in April 2009 that identified the Gliese 581 system as being the "best candidate for potentially habitable planets."
Hearing the news was "exciting and surprising," Zollinger said Wednesday. "This system in particular was a hot topic at the time (of our research). There were a lot of papers being written."
He said every star has a region around it "where conditions are just right, where life as we know it could exist." Key factors include a temperature range that would keep liquid water on the planet's surface, and a gravitational pull sufficient to maintain an atmosphere.
In the Gliese 581 system, situated in the Libra constellation, "planet G" is right in the middle of the habitable zone around the star. It has three times the mass of Earth, orbiting its sun in just under 37 days.
"This is clearly one of the most exciting areas of science these days," NSF's mathematical and physical sciences director Ed Seidel said in the organization's announcement of the discovery. "If we do discover life outside our planet, it would perhaps be the most significant discovery of all time."
Zollinger and Armstrong's paper identified three known planets around Gliese 581. The NSF findings a little more than a year later bring the number of planets in the system to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside our own.
Zollinger said the research he did at Weber State with Armstrong in a Virtual Planetary Laboratory collaboration included hundreds of computer simulations. "We would take known planets and their known characterizations and let the system evolve over millions of years in our simulation." Most of the work involved excluding many different planet sizes and distances that over time would prove unstable, he said.
The Weber State research ran independent of that announced Sept. 29 by the National Science Foundation. "The difference is we said it could be there. They actually found it and said it is there," said Zollinger, who is now working on a doctorate in physics at the University of Utah. "That was our hope, that we were showing that a planet of this size and distance is there and is in the habitable zone."
"One of our students predicted in 2009 the properties of the first earth-like planet around another star, and that planet has subsequently been discovered — with nearly the same parameters as the prediction," Armstrong said in a press release. "In my book, that is pretty exciting, and illustrates exactly how science is supposed to work."
e-mail: sfidel@desnews.com